ASP.NET 2.0 - Membership and Roles

Today, I have been working with SQL Server 2000 and Visual Studio 2005 to increase my speed in development by using Strongly Typed Datatypes and the Membership/Roles provided by SQL.

For now I am going to jump into using the Membership/Roles provided by ASP.NET.

Microsoft has made it easy to setup membership/role for you Web application, but did not explain the needs most freelance developers must use in order to use rented Web hosting space.

As for my self I develop on http://www.idevconsultants.com/ servers and they run SQL 2000. And not to mention I do not have keys to the server so I have to develop with what I can without making changes to IIS. This is the same for most developers.

So here is the trick to use this new membership tools.

Scott Gu blog http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/08/25/423703.aspx explains the ends and outs, but basically the secret is to run the following tool:

Open a command-line window on your system and run the aspnet_regsql.exe utility that is installed with ASP.NET 2.0 in under your C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.xyz directory. This tool will build all the Tables, StoredProcs needed to run the membership tools in ASP.NET 2.0.

VERY IMPORTANT: Next in your WEB.CONFIG name your connection string to

















Again DO NOT I REPEAT DO NOT change the name...

Testing Visual Studio with Firefox

In my job I develop for Intranets (IE) and Internet (All Browsers) and order to test Firefox I found the following article which was crucial to setting up the Firefox browser for testing an ASP.NET 2.0 application in order to get NTLM to work.

http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2005/07/22/firefox-authentication-with-ntlm/

Be sure to add localhost to your proxy if needed.