11.4. Custom providers for the Membership and Roles APIs

When you’re building an application from scratch, using the default schema provided by ASP.NET isn’t a problem. If you need to take additional steps because you need to control your database schema, you have specific logic behind your users, or you simply want to target a different kind of storage, what you need is a custom provider.

Both the Membership and Roles APIs are built with extensibility in mind, so developing a provider is not terribly difficult: you just need to overwrite a couple of methods in the respective abstract base classes. Because this scenario is based on the example we used in the previous section, you can use the same code as before. And the results you’ll get will be interesting.