How to handle membership in an ASP.NET MVC application?

Question

How would you handle membership in an ASP.NET MVC application? Using any external libraries? How would you do OpenID log in? username log in? email log in? any other that is worth looking into? Maybe all of them mixed into the application?

It seems ASP.NET comes with some pre-build user database (I'm totally new to .Net). The NerdDinner example uses it but then it makes the foreign keys use the username. That doesn't sound very good. Do you use this schema of two separate databases or only one? What do you use as the foreign key, any IDs?

I've found ASP.Net MVC Membership, anybody using it? does it work well? can it be expected to be maintained?

Answer 1

Membership Providers are not new to ASP.Net MVC, they were introduced with ASP.Net 2.0. The Membership Provider model is simply an abstraction layer between your application and whatever source you are authenticating your users against. You can switch providers easily by simply changing your web.config file.

It is easy to write a membership provider, there are many walkthroughs on the web. Typically you would do so if you were using a database that used a different schema than the default examples that come with ASP.Net (which is most of the time). The foreign keys on the username thing in the NerdDinner example is a simplistic example that you would rarely see on any real-world databases.

I would highly recommend using the Membership model. Controls like the Login control are built to make use of it, and it is well-designed and makes it easy to change or combine different login methods for your application. If you want to use OpenID, a quick google search brought up this OpenID Membership Provider.