R – Managing asp.net membership in production

asp.net-membershipconfigurationdeploymentnetwcf

I have been using the 'Web Site Administration Tool' that you can bring up in Visual Studio to manage users and roles in our dev and staging environment.

Currently we have no way of managing users and roles when the app goes to our production servers. for now we have been calling stored-procedure in the membership database to manually create initial users and roles which was a very tedious and error prone task.
I tried looking for management tools but couldn't find anything that is up-to-date.

what do you use to setup the initial users and roles in an asp.net membership enabled application?

ps. These are all WCF applications so I can't use asp.net membership controls.

Best Answer

You should build an application that can be used for this purpose, either a local client that can be run from a desktop or a hosted asp.net application.

That being said, as a quick and dirty solution you can try this:

Deploy web site administration tool to production: http://tech.chezporlier.com/node/3

Related Solutions

.net – How to manage asp.net SQL membership roles/users in production

I solved this problem by setting up a default super user at application start up.

By adding this to gobal.asax


    void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) 
    {
        // Code that runs on application startup

        // check that the minimal security settings are created
        Security.SetupSecurity();
    }

Then in the security class:


using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;

/// 
/// Creates minimum roles and user for application access.
/// 
public class Security
{
    // application roles
    public static string[] applicationRoles = 
        { "Roles1", "Roles2", "Roles3", "Roles4", "Roles5" };
    // super user
    private static string superUser = "super";
    // default password, should be changed on first connection
    private static string superUserPassword = "default";

    private Security()
    {
        //
        // TODO: Add constructor logic here
        //
    }

    /// 
    /// Creates minimal membership environment.
    /// 
    public static void SetupSecurity()
    {
        SetupRoles();
        SetupSuperuser();
    }

    /// 
    /// Checks roles, creates missing.
    /// 
    public static void SetupRoles()
    {
        // create roles
        for (int i = 0; i 
    /// Checks if superuser account is created.
    /// Creates the account and assigns it to all roles.
    /// 
    public static void SetupSuperuser()
    {
        // create super user
        MembershipUser user = Membership.GetUser(superUser);
        if (user == null)
            Membership.CreateUser(superUser, superUserPassword, "maintenance@acorel.com");

        // assign superuser to roles
        for (int i = 0; i

Once you have a default user, you can use AspNetWSAT or other.

.net – ASP.NET Web Site or ASP.NET Web Application

Website:

The Web Site project is compiled on the fly. You end up with a lot more DLL files, which can be a pain. It also gives problems when you have pages or controls in one directory that need to reference pages and controls in another directory since the other directory may not be compiled into the code yet. Another problem can be in publishing.

If Visual Studio isn't told to re-use the same names constantly, it will come up with new names for the DLL files generated by pages all the time. That can lead to having several close copies of DLL files containing the same class name, which will generate plenty of errors. The Web Site project was introduced with Visual Studio 2005, but it has turned out not to be popular.

Web Application:

The Web Application Project was created as an add-in and now exists as part of SP 1 for Visual Studio 2005. The main differences are the Web Application Project was designed to work similarly to the Web projects that shipped with Visual Studio 2003. It will compile the application into a single DLL file at build time. To update the project, it must be recompiled and the DLL file published for changes to occur.

Another nice feature of the Web Application project is it's much easier to exclude files from the project view. In the Web Site project, each file that you exclude is renamed with an excluded keyword in the filename. In the Web Application Project, the project just keeps track of which files to include/exclude from the project view without renaming them, making things much tidier.

Reference

The article ASP.NET 2.0 - Web Site vs Web Application project also gives reasons on why to use one and not the other. Here is an excerpt of it:

You need to migrate large Visual Studio .NET 2003 applications to VS 2005? use the Web Application project.

You want to open and edit any directory as a Web project without creating a project file? use Web Site project.

You need to add pre-build and post-build steps during compilation? use Web Application project.

You need to build a Web application using multiple Web projects? use the Web Application project.

You want to generate one assembly for each page? use the Web Site project.

You prefer dynamic compilation and working on pages without building entire site on each page view? use Web Site project.

You prefer single-page code model to code-behind model? use Web Site project.

Web Application Projects versus Web Site Projects (MSDN) explains the differences between the web site and web application projects. Also, it discusses the configuration to be made in Visual Studio.