The ASP.NET membership framework was introduced as part of .NET 2.0. It was designed to
fulfill common website membership requirements of the time, which were generally a user
name, password, and some ancillary profile information. Membership information also needed
to be stored in a central repository for access from multiple servers. The original membership
framework had a few areas that supported extensibility, such as the provider system and
the ability to store additional profile information, but the framework was designed mainly
around users, roles, and profiles.
When working with a classic provider model, setup and initialization is based on
information in the configuration files. For example, Listing 5-3 shows code for the
SqlMembershipProvider in the Web.config file.