Chapter 17 * user authentication*

This chapter goes into the controls in asp.net that do user authentication and access controls to your site using the different levels of authentication. This chapter brought everything together and added new functionality in a very interesting way. You use a template website provided by microsoft. You then add a database to this website, a database auto-created by the asp.net controls you use to create a new user, and allow people to log into your site. I then created different login pages, the login page, the new user login page, the forgot password page. I also added a functional button to the master page that tracks login status and allows you to log out.

I then went through and played with the login access tools. I learned how to set up different folders to hold different pages that are of a more limited acces. So pages only administrators can see are in the admin folder, and less restricted pages in a less restricted folder, and then regular pages in another folder and so on. Then I set access controls to each folder, to make things easier to organize, and asp.net keeps track of everything for me. It also briefly shows how to set access to individual pages through the web.config file, just like we did with java, in case I want to know how that works.

This is pretty powerful stuff that asp.net makes very easy to implement and use.