Authentication engine for ASP.Net MVC like Devise for Rails?

Question

Devise Authentication gem ( http://github.com/plataformatec/devise ) is a Rails tool to authenticate a user and set up his identity in a Rails app. I have found so many cool things like this for Rails that I am just blown away at that whole platform. I've only been learning Rails since April, and I just love it.

However, I still also work in ASP.Net MVC, and I have created my own little login controller for my MVC app. It seems like everyone does this for their MVC app, right? It was not really a pain to do not, but man what a sense of re-inventing the wheel! I only handle the basic sign_in action, and not all the other actions the Devise handles like emailing account info, resetting of passwords, sign_up, etc. So, naturally I'm wondering if there is a .Net equivalent of Devise floating around out there.

I know that the .Net framework has an authentication component, and I did try it out, but it's very heavy in some respects, and very lacking in other basic features that Devise just handles with ease. Even the views for each action are not nearly as complete as the view engine support that Rails has. The table schemas for the .Net authentication are overly complex for my needs. Many apps have their own Users table with and Id, username, password, etc, and we just need an easy way to hook into that table and get all the conrtollers, actions, and views generated for us. The goodness of the Devise gem in Rails is that with a couple of generator commands at the command line, and a few lines here and there to configure it in my app and controllers then BOOM, the whole thing is just working with so little effort I could'nt even believe it.

I'm hoping this new .Net NuPack thing might provide an opportunity for easy bringing in tools like this into a MVC app (what Rails calls a gem), but first someone has to build it. Does anyone know if it has been done yet?

Answer 1

I feel you, I'm in the same boat - RoR at home, wishing for similar functionality at work. I haven't gotten a chance to try them out yet, but there has been some activity on the NuGet authentication package front. Check out:

http://nuget.org/List/Packages/Altairis.Web.Security

http://nuget.org/List/Packages/SimpleMembership.Mvc3.Sample