Question

I am currently designing a Membership/Profile scheme for a new project I am working on and I was hoping to get some input from others.

The project is a ASP.NET web application and due to the short time frame, I am trying to use any and all built in .NET framework components I can. The site will probably entertain < 5000 users. Each user will have a profile where custom settings and objects will be persisted between visits.

I am required to use an existing Active Directory for authentication. Since the AD schema cannot be extended to hold new fields, I am required to hold user settings and objects in a different data store. I have also been told ADAM is probably not a possible solution.

I was hoping to use the Active Directory Membership Provider for my authentication scheme and the SQL Profile Provider as a user profile data store. I would prefer not to build a custom profile provider, but I do not see this posing much of a problem if need be.

I was wondering if this is even a possible solution, and if so, has anyone had any luck with this approach.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

First off – I’ve never done this myself.

There’s a really excellent series (14 !! parts) on the whole topic of ASP.NET 2.0 membership, roles and profile provider systems by Scott Mitchell at 4 Guys from Rolla.

According to my understanding, you should be able to configure this behavior you are looking for by using basically these two sections in your web.config:

  <!-- configure Active Directory membership provider -->
  <membership defaultProvider="AspNetActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider">
    <providers>
      <add name="AspNetActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider"
           type="System.Web.Security.ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider, 
                 System.Web, Version=2.0.3600, Culture=neutral, 
                 PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />
    </providers>
  </membership>

  <!-- configure SQL-based profile provider -->      
  <profile defaultProvider="SqlProvider">
    <providers>
      <add name="SqlProvider"
        type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider"
        connectionStringName="SqlProfileProviderConnection"
        applicationName="YourApplication" />
    </providers>

    <!-- specify any additional properties to store in the profile -->   
    <properties>
      <add name="ZipCode" />
      <add name="CityAndState" />
    </properties>
  </profile>

I would think this ought to work 🙂