11.2. Handling user authentication: introducing the Membership API

The Membership API is a set of programming APIs used to interact with membership features inside an ASP.NET application. The Membership API is based on the Provider Model design pattern.

Provider Model is a variant of the Strategy pattern, whereby the implementation details can be selected at runtime. As shown in figure 11.4, Strategy is an abstract type declaring a common interface, used by the ConcreteStrategy (the algorithm implementation). Context uses the common interface to execute the algorithm implementation given by ConcreteStrategy and holds a reference to this concrete object.