SharePoint - ASP.Net Controls Integration

Question

I have basically two separate sites, a SharePoint collaboration site, and an ASP.Net application site. The only linkage between the two are the hyperlinks going back and forth, and the user validation on the behalf of the SharePoint site. The user will enter and be authenticated through the SharePoint site and then may browse to the ASP.Net application.

What is the best way to integrate the two sites together? Is there an easy way to give the users a seamless experience while maintaining two sites?

UPDATE: I followed all of your advice and settled on going with Chris' answer.

Andrew Connel actually deploys the .aspx code behind pages as a SharePoint feature.

He sets out how to do this on his site here.

Answer 1

Can the Asp.net application live within a web part on the sharepoint site?

Answer 2

You can use the ASP.NET Membership Provider on a SharePoint site. That is probably you're best option if you're not able to go with Windows Authentication.

There's a good article by Andrew Connell on how to set up the Membership Provider for SharePoint. It is MOSS-described but the practices can be ported to WSS.

http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/HowToConfigPublishingSiteWithDualAuthProvidersAndAnonAccess.aspx

Answer 3

Minimal

You can create a managed path to allow your asp.net application to be hosted within a virtual directory on the sharepoint path (e.g. http://intranet/aspnetsite)

you could also create a custom control for the asp.net site that would read the top navigation from Sharepoint and display it for the asp.net site. The look & feel, css would have to be applied custom for both.

Full integration

Otherwise you could convert the asp.net application to a series of webcontrols and host them within sharePoint directly as either controls on layoutpages or controls hosted by custom webparts.

Answer 4

On our side, we completly changed the master page of the SharePoint site and rebranded the whole thing. The application totally behave like a normal ASP.NET application except for the "directories" or folders where users can create pages.

This allows us to have different sections where users edit and create pages directly in SharePoint while others are application pages.

So, you can put any of your pages anywhere within SharePoint. SharePoint Designer helps you do a lot of those things.

Cheers,