Question

I have been trying to whip up a quick and dirty application. This application needs to support user authentication. To accomplish this, I thought I could rely on the built in Login control and utilize the credentials ability of the web.config like so:

<authentication mode="Forms">
  <forms defaultUrl="/authenticated/menu.aspx" loginUrl="Default.aspx">
    <credentials passwordFormat="Clear">
      <user name="user1" password="p@ssw0rd" />  
    </credentials>
  </forms>
</authentication>

However, it seems the Login control requires a Membership Provider. I have the following two questions:

1. Does a membership provider that works with the web.config exist? if so, where? I haven’t been able to find one?
2. Is it possible to login to a web application using the credentials in the web.config?

Thank you!

Answer 1

There’s no built in membership provider for Web.config. You can manually validate the credentials using the FormsAuthentication.Authenticate method.