Anyone uses ASP .NET Membership?

Question

Was wandering if anyone uses ASP .NET membership? If you do, tell me what you think about it.

If you don't use it, Are you planning to use it on future projects? If not, why?

RWendi

Answer 1

Yes. Have used it quite a lot, and it will save you a lot of work.

There are some pain points like changing usernames, and administrative reset of passwords, that clients will often ask for, and you will have to hack your way around them.

The role provider is also pretty handy, and there are a lot of prebuilt controls that work with it, although recently hit a bug between role manager and aspnet ajax that has been a PITA.

The model is generally very good, even if you have shop around for some different providers that suit your needs.

Overall, it's not perfect, but if you can live with it and work around it's issues, it will save you heaps of code.

For some situations, it is maybe using a chainsaw when a butter knife would do, but it's there, it works, and there are plenty of other people using it.

Its one kind of hammer, for the price, is ok, but there is no golden hammer.

Answer 2

I use it in most of my projects. There have been times where it doesn't do what I want it to but there is almost always a way around that. We have used it with Active Directory, Novell EDirectory, and Forms Authentication.

The provider model is great for creating those work arounds. Much better then rolling your own membership code.

The Table Profile Provider is a great tool for getting around the ineffient out-of-the-box implementation of SqlProfileProvider.

There is another product that I have heard of but never tried, called Visual Guard. I would be intersted in any comments anyone has on that.

Answer 3

I've used it on almost all of my projects. It will save you a ton of work, it's easy to use and .NET comes with a lot of prebuilt controls so you won't have to worry about writing your own retrieve password control, login control etc.

Don't listen to people who tell you that you can't collect the information you're interested in. That's what the profile-provider is for (I agree with Brian, use the Table Profile Provider for a more efficient implementation that is also easier to maintain).

Answer 4

Note that the profile provider only works out of the box with the website template:

http://www.codersbarn.com/post/2008/06/01/ASPNET-Web-Site-versus-Web-Application-Project.aspx

Anthony :-)