ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool

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ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool is a utility that helps you configure and manage websites created with Visual Studio 2005 and later. It was introduced with ASP.NET 2.0 along with the Microsoft Management Console snap-in. You can open it from Visual Studio by selecting ASP.NET Configuration in the Website or Project menu, or by clicking the ASP.NET Configuration icon in Solution Explorer.

Programmatic access to its features is available through the System.Web.Security namespace. The Membership and Roles classes store and manage user information in the ASPNETDB database. Users can be authenticated with Membership.ValidateUser or FormsAuthentication.Authenticate, and page-based authorization is handled with the HttpApplication.AuthorizeRequest event.

The tool has three main tabs:

- Security: Create users and roles, group users under roles, and assign access rules at the role or user level. When you modify settings, a database is created in the App_Data folder named ASPNETDB by default to store membership data. This tab makes authentication and authorization easier than building them from scratch, but access rules can only be defined at the folder level, not the page level.

- Application: Set application options such as SMTP settings and debugging/tracing. These settings affect web.config rather than the ASPNETDB database. Settings are stored as name-value pairs in web.config.

- Provider: Choose the database provider for the ASPNETDB database (SQL Server is common; Oracle is available for Oracle databases). This tab lets you decide where to store all data for the administration tool or to use separate databases for different purposes. The Security page will appear only after you select a provider in this tab.