ASP.net MVC 4 Users and Roles administration ("Membership.Provider" property must be an instance of "ExtendedMembershipProvider".)

Question

I've tried for 2 days to get something working but so far it's been pointless. What I need is to manage users and their roles, nothing else.

What I've tried is to understand how to do it in MVC but I can't seem to find a detailed tutorial on how to do it, either on the internet or in any MVC 4 book.

I started by enabling the aspnet database with the aspnet_regsql utility, this create these tables:

That's all I found on the tutorial, it does not show how to interact with these tables (which I assume is with the default membership provider), so far I've found there are 3 main options for doing this:

• Default membership provider (from whom I know nothing)
• Universal Providers
• SimpleMembership

I found this tutorial:

http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/mvc-music-store/mvc-music-store-part-7

Here they ask to create a new MVC 4 application project with internet application template and copy all the files relating the account control.

I did that for my project but as soon as I try to log in I get :

To call this method, the "Membership.Provider" property must be an instance of "ExtendedMembershipProvider".

which according to this forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuredevelopment/thread/d352bb1b-577c-42b7-8872-5ed59cd65f32/

is because of how I defined the profile, membership and roleManager providers on my web.config file which is defined as follows:

<profile>
  <providers>
    <clear />
    <add name="AspNetSqlProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider" connectionStringName="DatabaseConnection" applicationName="/" />
  </providers>
</profile>
<membership>
  <providers>
    <clear />
    <add name="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="DatabaseConnection" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="false" maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5" minRequiredPasswordLength="6" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" passwordAttemptWindow="10" applicationName="/" />
  </providers>
</membership>
<roleManager enabled="true">
  <providers>
    <clear />
    <add connectionStringName="DatabaseConnection" applicationName="/" name="AspNetSqlRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider" />
    <add applicationName="/" name="AspNetWindowsTokenRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.WindowsTokenRoleProvider" />
  </providers>
</roleManager>

All I need is to be able to add new users, assign roles to them and show different content according to the role accessing the view.

Question #1 What is the membership provider being used when I create an MVC 4 application with an internet application template?

Question #2

What am I doing wrong with the web.config file? How can I define the providers correctly?

Question #3

Which option suits me better? If you know a nice tutorial for it could you please link me to it?

Any help will be really appreciated! thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Membership provider you are using is dated. New Universal Membership Provider uses new table names without prefix aspnet_.

1) Please take a look at Scott Hanselman's link.

2) You do not need profile if you do not use it. roleManager configuration is not correct.

FYI: Please define machineKey explicitly in web.config; it will save you a lot of headache in the future.

P.S. I agreed with you. I just finished reading Pro ASP.NET MVC 4 by Adam Freeman; he did not mention about Membership Provider. ASP.NET MVC 4 and the Web API by Jamie Kurtz uses legacy Membership Provider if you want to read.

Answer 2

Question #1 What is the membership provider being used when I create an MVC 4 application with an internet application template?

Answer: SimpleMembershipProvider

Question #2 What am I doing wrong with the web.config file? how can I define the providers correctly?

Answer: For SimpleMembershipProvider, modifications to the web.config file are not necessary. See here for detailed configuration/setup information and tutorial: http://aaron-hoffman.blogspot.com/2013/02/aspnet-mvc-4-membership-users-passwords.html

Answer 3

Membership and security was extremely overcomplicated in ASP.Net and is still overcomplicated in ASP.NET MVC. But fortunately it's possible to not use built-in membership at all. I've created simple solutione and used in a lot of projects and now added it to github see http://github.com/TesserisPro/ASP.NET-SImple-Security-Provider You can easy customize it.