RE: [Rainbowportal-devel] Membership API and porting to 2.0

[Cory I. <cis...@ya...>]

Charles,

What are you talking about?  

The 2.x Membership API does not tightly couple you to anything.  You are
only coupled to the provider that you define.  It frees you up to use any
database, web service, etc. that you wish for your authentication store.

Writing any API that does not incorporate the Membership API would be a
complete mistake and I will have nothing to do with it.  By supporting
Microsoft's Membership API we will be able to use any Membership Providers
that are written.  This will enable Rainbow to support the custom membership
providers that various companies write enabling them to plug in Rainbow
seamlessly for authentication.  This is critical.

When you say that Membership is badly designed what are you referring to?
What is missing from it?  Do you believe that the missing parts cannot be
implemented in a Rainbow API that wraps over the top of the Membership API?

I believe it is important here to repeat what is in the 2nd blog entry I
referred to originally.

Why use Microsoft's Membership API?  

One of the important things the API does for us is standardize how
authentication is handled in ASP.NET.  With everyone cooking up their own
solutions we constantly are learning a different authentication methodology
and system with every application.  With standardization of the API we can
now use front end tools like the Login controls in ASP.NET 2.0.  As long as
developers stick with the base API's, controls can be written against them
and have high levels of assurance that they will work consistently.

Second, an equally important feature of Membership is the underlying
provider model for implementation.  With a provider back-end developers are
able to completely customize their data storage and data access as it
related to Membership.  This design pattern also allows every application
that uses the Membership API to share user accounts and roles when so
desired.  How many times have we heard the complaints that ASP.NET Forums
doesn't use the same authentication system as DNN, Rainbow and IBS.  As
these systems are updated to support the Membership API the only thing
required to share authentication will be a configuration line in the
web.config to point them all at the same provider.

Cory Isakson



-----Original Message-----
From: rai...@li...
[mailto:rai...@li...] On Behalf Of
Charles M. Carroll
Sent: Saturday, November 27, 2004 12:06 AM
To: rai...@li...
Subject: Re: [Rainbowportal-devel] Membership API and porting to 2.0

The thing is what we really need is rainbow sites to be able to share 
logins (via Webservices and with SSL Certificates or Certifying sites) 
without tight coupling to each others database and that 2.x API does not 
offer that.

So we might as well write a fresh API 5 x better than that.

That feature/API is really rather badly designed (almost as bad as the 1.x 
DataGrids) so I think we should not waste our time using a 
faulty/incomplete API which the MS folks only half thought out.