Project Description

This project aims to provide you with a basic MVC website from which you can build up your own MVC application without having to implement Login/Logout, Registration, and User Administration manually.

Introduction

One of my very first blog posts (and most definitely my most popular so far) revolved around how to integrate the MVC Framework with ASP.Net membership and forms authentication. It has remained popular to this day, but unfortunately the Preview 2 release of the MVC framework has caused much of the code I released in that article to no longer function correctly.

Even before the release of Preview 2, I had been planning to extend the samples I was providing to offer more useful features. I don't know about you, but nearly every website I ever create with ASP.Net requires some kind of security/membership system. My preference is to use the built-in system when possible (except for the horrible Profiles sub-system). This means creating login, logout, & registration functionality every time, as well as creating administrative screens for managing the users that enter your system.

WebForms provides some controls to help with the login and registration process, but user administration has always been delegated to either (a) the built-in tool that runs separately and doesn't work remotely or (b) rolling your own solution. The development of the MVC framework seems to me like a good time to resolve this scenario and provide the community with an array of pre-built tools to help boot-strap projects so that we can stop working on infrastructure and start working on the heart of the individual application.

With that in mind I have created this CodePlex project: the ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit. It currently provides controllers and views for all of the common authentication and user administration needs, including:

• Login/Logout
• Registration
• List of Registered Users
• User Details / Administration
• Role Management

A big thanks goes out to Rob Conery, as I borrowed his recent Authentication Filters and included those, along with my recently released Error Handling Filters.

To see some screenshots of the starter kit, visit my original announcement of the project.

NSFAQ (Not-So Frequently Asked Questions)

Q: Does this compete with or have any relation to MvcContrib?
A: No. MvcContrib is a great project that aims to feature extras like alternate routing, view engines, and IoC integration. This project is simply a starter kit to help get membership-based applications off the ground a little quicker. There is no reason you could not use both projects together.

Q: What dependencies does using this starter kit saddle me with?
A: Originally the goal was none, other than the ASP.Net Membership system. In an effort to provide more login options out-of-the-box we are now utilizing Andrew Arnott & company's DotNetOpenId library. In a later release we hope to break OpenID and WindowsLive integration out into separate modules that you can choose to use or discard.

Q: Who is responsible for this?
A: The contributers are:

1. Myself (Troy Goode) - I started the project shortly after Preview 2 came out in response to the popularity of my earlier MVC Authentication articles.
2. Maarten Balliauw - Maarten joined me quickly after the first release and has contributed much to the project including all of the component controllers, Windows Live integration, and the basic password recovery features.
3. Greg Beamer - Greg joined us in late June to help improve the password recovery experience.

Please contact me if you'd like to help!