Hour 20. Managing Your Site s Users

Hour 20. Managing Your Site's Users

In this hour, we will cover

• How to configure a website to support user accounts

• How and where user account information is stored

• Creating and managing user accounts and roles through the ASP.NET Website Administration Tool

• Granting and denying access to folders based on users, user type, or role

• Logging users on to the site using the Login control

• Recovering a user's forgotten password with the PasswordRecovery control

Starting in Hour 22, "Devising a Plan for the Photo Album Application," we will begin looking at how to create a website that allows users to upload and share their digital pictures. Such an application requires user accounts, which store information about a particular user. When a user wants to upload an image to his photo album, he'll first need to log on to the site by providing a username and password. This logon process identifies the user so that we can associate him with his account.

If you bank online or have ever purchased an item from an online retailer, then you're already familiar with the process of creating an account and logging on to a website from the end user's perspective. But what steps are required from the web developer's perspective to add support for user accounts? How and where does a web developer store user account information? What steps need to be taken to create a new user? How does a user log on to the site or log off?

Because user accounts are an increasingly common requirement for websites, the ASP.NET team has included a plethora of features designed to make supporting user accounts as easy as possible. As we'll see in this hour, we can configure our website to support user accounts with just a few clicks of the mouse. When the website has been configured properly, the login Web controls provide the user interface necessary for performing user account-related tasks, including logging in and out of the site, creating a new user account, sending a forgotten password, and so on.