25/Jan/2008

ASP.NET is no more about just hosting web pages with static and server side content. Although the primary function of IIS/ASP.NET is Web Site provisioning, with the release of ASP.NET 2.0 & 3.5, ASP.NET provides lot of services/framework which are/can be used by most of the web applications.

Some of these services are even available to .NET Framework based non web applications like Windows Forms or WPF based applications. With .NET 3.5 and WCF released some of the services can be exposed as SOAP based web services and so can be used by any application on any platform.

Here is a list of some of the services available to Web Applications hosted on ASP.NET :

• Membership Service

  • Ready to use built-in service for storing & validating user credentials.
  • Works as a Authentication module.
  • <membership> element of Web.config is used to enable membership management.
  • Can be used with Forms Authentication and Login Controls
  • Comes with credentials store provider for SQL Server & Active Directory. Supports custom providers.
  • Can be integrated with Role & Profile Management Services as described below.

• Role Management

  • Allows you to create Roles and assign users to it.
  • <roleManager> element of Web.config is used to enable role management.
  • <authorization> element of Web.config can be used to define rules.
  • Can be used in conjunction with Membership Service to provide User Identity.
  • Role Management is exposed as both .NET APIs and WCF based service.
  • Comes with Roles store provider for SQL Server, Windows & Authorization Manager(AzMan). Supports custom providers also.

• Site Navigation

  • Helps in managing/displaying the navigation menus on site with multiple page/level hierarchy.
  • Provides Site maps to describe logical structure.
  • Provides ASP.NET controls to display navigation menus on site based on site maps.
  • Access Rules can be configured for various items in navigation menu.
  • APIs available to manage navigation menus at runtime.
  • Comes with a xml file based site map data store. Supports custom site map data store providers.
  • <siteMap> element of Web.config is used to enable site maps.

• Profile Service

  • Can be used to store User specific data. Mainly used for non critical data like theme selection, etc.
  • Profile service persists the data using one of the profile data store providers.
  • Comes with Profile data store provider for SQL Server. Supports custom providers.
  • Can be used with both authenticated and Anonymous users. Anonymous users are identified using cookies.
  • <profile> element of Web.config is used to enable Profile management.
  • Profile Service is exposed as both .NET APIs and WCF based service.

• State Management

  • Provides two types of server based state management capabilities : Application & Session Level.
  • Provides options of persisting the state externally. Comes with providers for state server & Sql Server.
  • Profile Service (discussed above) can also be used for light-weight state management.
  • HttpApplicationState class can be used for managing application level state.
  • HttpSessionState class can be used for managing session level state.
  • <sessionState> element of Web.config can be used to configure session state.

• Application Services

  •  ASP.NET gives an option to expose Authentication, Role & Profile services as web services & WCF services so that they can be used by other clients irrespective of technology & platform.
  • Client libraries are provided for ASP.NET AJAX apps and .NET based Windows Apps to access these web services.
  • Other clients can access these services through WCF based services.
  • <system.web.extensions> element of web.config can be used to enable these web services.

• Other Services

  • Master Pages
  • Themes

With ASP.NET 3.5 extensions, many more value added services going to be introduced soon.