Question

I’m running into issues when I try to instantiate a new DefaultMembershipProvider (system.web.providers).

DefaultMembershipProvider _provider = new DefaultMembershipProvider();

After this I would assume settings are loaded from the web.config but this is not the case. For example minRequiredPasswordLength remains 0.

Here’s my membership settings:

<membership>
    <providers>
        <add applicationName="/"
             connectionStringName="MyDB"
             enablePasswordRetrieval="false"
             enablePasswordReset="true"
             maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5"
             minRequiredPasswordLength="6"
             minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0"
             passwordAttemptWindow="10"
             requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false"
             requiresUniqueEmail="false" 
             name="DefaultMembershipProvider"
             type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultMembershipProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
    </providers>
</membership>

I can create new users via the asp.net configuration tool without problem so my database connection seems ok.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

No need to instantiate it yourself. You should just be able to access the static properties and methods of the Membership class directly (you’ll notice that most of them are static).

For instance, this would give you the minimum required password length that you have configured:

int minPassLength = System.Web.Security.Membership.MinRequiredPasswordLength;

You can do a number of other convenient things with the static methods, like getting all your users (with the GetAllUsers method) or updating specific user information (with the UpdateUser method).

Also, I believe you should have the type in your membership settings set to

type="System.Web.Security.MembershipProvider"