Displaying a menu that shows items based on the current user can be done easily by using roles in membership. In ASP.NET 2.0 membership and login controls make it easy to setup and maintain users for a web site. However, membership comes with some overhead. For example, a database (usually SQL Server) is required to store user information. Another issue with membership is deployment since all ASP.NET applications can use the same database.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to display menu items based on the user from an XML file without using ASP.NET membership. This has limitations, but very little overhead.

Figure 1 - This is a screenshot of the sample menu application