Why should I use ASP.NET Membership security model?

Question

I'm updating my website at the moment and figure that if I am to update my login/security mode, now is a good time.

I have looked through the Membership model which is included in ASP.NET but I'm not convinced that it will provide any benefit apart from being familiar to other .NET developers.

There seems to be quite a lot of documentation for it, but little discussion for why its worth the effort.

Can anybody shed some light upon this?

Answer 1

I see little benefit to using membership for a large site. This has been marketed as 'the' solution for ASP.Net authentication. However, really it looks like Microsoft is just trying to position the old Membership Server product as soemthing that everyone all of a sudden needs.

I worked on Membership Server at Msft around 10 years ago. Was also a lead developer on shop.microsoft.com, and I can tell you we used no internal server products on that site--not commerce server, not membership server. Not sure how they are doing it now--but I think the general consensus at that point was that those type of packages generally got in the way of what we were trying to do.

It could be useful for a smaller site, or if you have limited resources... i.e. a few hundred users for a departmental or small company intranet, where you don't want to invest much time or resources. The more I look at it, the more it seems completely inappropriate for larger, custom web sites.

What I really don't understand is how almost every ASP.Net book seems to push this as the only way to do it, rather than one way to do it.