Question

I’ve recently been getting back into ASP.NET, and I’m learning all about MVC4 and such. One thing which has been annoying me is the SimpleMembership stuff. It is supposedly there to save you time, a nice little membership system all made for you, but I’ve had nothing but problems getting it to work.

I’d rather just have my own tables, my own authentication code, my own handlers.

Is this something commonly done though? Do a lot of people use or discard SimpleMembership?

I don’t want to become a web developer who has to work with SimpleMembership and can’t get it to work, that would be embarrassing, but then on the other hand it seems so cumbersome and fiddly.

All opinions, facts and thoughts appreciated.

Answer 1

Is this something commonly done though? Do a lot of people use or discard SimpleMembership?

If the SimpleMembershipProvider doesn’t fit the specific requirements of your application then it is perfectly fine to roll your own provider and not use the one that’s built-in.

Do a lot of people use or discard SimpleMembership?

I can’t speak about other people, but personally I decide based on the specific project requirements and whether the SimpleMembershipProvider is something that would fit meet them or whether I should implement a custom provider.

On the other hand ruling out the SimpleMemeberhsipProvider because you don’t know how to use it or couldn’t make it work, yeah that would be embarrassing. In this case I would recommend you start reading about it in the literature. And of course if you encounter some specific problems with it, don’t hesitate to show your code so far and the progress you’ve made, explaining the precise difficulties you are encountering with it, and people on StackOveflow would be more than willing to help you.