Adding security to Web sites can be a challenge. There are many ways to represent users and perform authentication, and many Web developers create their own solutions. ASP.NET 2.0 provides easy-to-use membership and personalization features. Membership allows you to create users, authenticate them, and restrict actions or pages based on those credentials. Usernames and passwords are stored in a database, by default, while page security settings are stored in the configuration files. These settings are exposed through the Web Site Administration Tool, and through drop-in-place controls such as Login and the CreateUserWizard.

Personalization has become an essential part of modern Web sites. This may involve different color schemes, taking into account time zones in date stamps, or just greeting users by name. Rather than writing complex code to support this manually, you can take advantage of the new personalization support in ASP.NET 2.0. Using the Web Site Administration Tool you can specify properties to save for each user, then use these properties when rendering the pages. The extra effort is small, but the impact can be huge!

Completely redesigned and improved, Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 provides a highly reliable, manageable, secure, and scalable Web application infrastructure for all versions of Windows Server 2003. Learn more about IIS 6.0 on the TryIIS Web site.