Understanding ASP.NET Roles and Membership - A Beginner's Tutorial

How many sites have you seen that requires you to login? I guess the answer to this question is "almost all of them". Well, the idea behind this article is to understand how ASP.NET lets us create sites with an authentication and authorization mechanism in place and how we can use ASP.NET server controls to quickly and efficiently implement this.

Background

When we are working on applications where authentication and authorization is a key requirement, then we will find the ASP.NET roles and membership feature very useful. Authentication means validating users. In this step, we verify user credentials to check whether the person tying to log in is the right one or not. Authorization on the other hand is keeping track of what the current user is allowed to see and what should be hidden from him. It is more like keeping a register to what to show and what not to show to the user.

Whenever a user logs in, he will have to authenticate himself with his credentials. Once he is authenticated, he will be authorized to see resources/pages of the website. Mostly these two concepts go together and ASP.NET provides us with some server controls that provide a lot of boilerplate functionality out of the box. If we use ASP.NET's authentication and authorization mechanism, then we can focus on what should be authorized and who should be authenticated rather than worrying about how to do that.

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