Custom Membership Provider or Profile Provider in mvc asp.net

Question

I'm venturing into the world of asp.net mvc. I have not yet understood whether it makes sense to use a custom Membership Provider or use the Profile provider for the user management?

Answer 1

Membership provider - manages user names, email addresses, and passwords.

Profile provider - manages all other custom user settings, such as name and preferences.

So, to answer your question, you should use both, because they serve different purposes.

Answer 2

One, Membership providers and Profile providers serve two different purposes. The Membership provider provides a user list and authentication functionality. The Profile provider provides a way to store application-specific data associated with each user.

Whether you need a custom provider depends on what type of datastore you want to use. The two built-in Membership providers allow for using an Active Directory domain (generally only appropriate if you're developing an application for a corporate intranet) or an MS SQL Server Database. The one built-in Profile provider uses MS SQL. If you want to use a different type of datastore, for example a PostgreSQL database, then you'll need a custom provider for that particular datastore.