An Introduction to the ASP.NET Application Services
Versions of ASP.NET before ASP.NET 2.0 had some support for security. In ASP.NET 1.x
applications, you needed to write a lot of code to implement a solid security strategy. The downside
of writing this code is that it was often pretty much the same in all your websites. You were more or
less forced to write the same code over and over again to implement a security mechanism.
These problems were solved in ASP.NET 2.0, which shipped with the application services: a set
of services you can use in your website to support management of users, roles, profiles, and more.
These services are based on a provider model, something you’ll learn more about shortly. The application
services are still strongly present in ASP.NET 4.5 and have been updated to simplify confi guration
and deployment.
ASP.NET 4.5 ships with a number of application services. The most important ones are:
‰ Membership — Enables you to manage and work with user accounts in your system.
‰ Roles — Enables you to manage the roles to which your users can be assigned.
‰ Profi le — Enables you to store user-specifi c data in a back-end database.
Figure 16-1 gives an overview of these services and shows how they are related to your website and
the underlying data stores that the services may use.