Question

I’m wondering what the basic protocol is for storing users in a database, creating accounts, and authenticating them – with ASP.NET MVC 3 framework (using C#), and Azure SQL.

More specifically:

1.) Where in an ASP.NET C# MVC3 Visual Studio project do I write code that only runs on the back-end? Such as logging into my database as an admin, so I can write to and read from the database.

2.) Where should I make database calls from using MVC framework? Do I call a back-end function (e.g. – to create a new account in the database) from the controller?

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

I’m not 100% sure whether you are talking about SQL Users or Application users.

However, generally, what ASP.Net MVC applications do is:

• they use one or two defined users to connect to the database (e.g. they might define a read-write and a readonly connection for different types of queries)
• they use the ASP.Net Membership API for application-level user accounts
• they use an ORM framework like NHibernate or Entity Framework for other database access

There are lots of tutorials and articles for this sort of information out there – one place to look might be Scott Hanselman’s blog – see:

• a tutorial on using ASP.Net Membership with SQL Azure
• the Mix11 tools walkthrough – including Code First Entity Framework