The following are the built-in providers of the ASP.NET
Provider Model.
·
Membership Providers
·
Role Management Providers
·
Profile Providers
·
Site Map Providers
·
Session State Providers
·
Web Event Providers
·
Web Parts Personalization Providers
·
Protected Configuration Providers
The Membership Provider
According to MSDN, "ASP.NET membership gives you a
built-in way to validate and store user credentials. ASP.NET membership
therefore helps you manage user authentication in your Web sites." You can
know more on how Membership in ASP.NET works here. With
ASP.NET 2.0, user management and roles administration has been simplified a
lot. The Membership Provider or the Membership API that ships with ASP.NET 2.0
is used to manage the users of the application and their respective roles. It
is extensible, but can work with SQL Server database and Active Directory.
However, you can extent this API so that it can work with other databases as
well.
The Roles Provider
A Role Provider is responsible for retrieval and storage of
roles information to and from a data store. You have the SqlRoleProvider that
is responsible for storing roles information in the SQL Server database. You
can however, extend this class to create your custom implementation and store
roles information in any data store.
Profile Providers
Profile Providers can be used to store user's profile
information. According to MSDN, "Profile providers provide the interface
between ASP.NET's profile service and profile data sources." Actually, the
Profile provider in the ASP.NET 2.0 Provider Model is represented by the ProfileProvider
class. Note all these provider abstract classes extend the ProviderBase
abstract class in the ASP.NET 2.0 Provider Model.
Custom Providers
Custom Providers are those that you create generally by
extending the existing providers to suit your specific requirements. The
following are the benefits of creating Custom Providers.
·
Storage of membership information across any database or other
data sources that are not supported by default
·
Managing the membership information as per your own schema
