Chapter 8. ASP.NET AJAX Application Services

ASP.NET provides a rich set of application services that are fundamental in building Web applications. You don't have to reinvent key aspects of the application infrastructure. Instead, you can leverage ASP.NET to take care of these details while you focus on the more unique aspects of your site. In this chapter you will see how to take advantage of ASP.NET application services in your application and how to access them from the browser with JavaScript for a better user experience.

The ASP.NET application services handle authentication, per user customization, and user membership. Forms Authentication makes it possible to easily authenticate users against virtually any back-end credentials storage. The Authentication Service is built with a provider model. This architecture gives you flexibility to plug in other versions. If you don't want to use the authentication provider included with ASP.NET, you can configure it to use your own custom version. The role management service allows you to create, delete, access, or disable user accounts and track a user's membership in various roles. You can easily customize content for authenticated users based on the roles they are in. ASP.NET also includes a personalization feature for storing and retrieving profile information about specific users. This can be used for both authenticated users and anonymous users.

Before ASP.NET AJAX features were released, these services were available only from the server. You could write code in any .NET Framework language of your choosing to authenticate users, manage roles, and work with the Profile personalization data. You could also make use of a set of built-in controls for presenting the user with an interface for logging in, displaying their authentication status, creating new users, or for retrieving forgotten passwords. This can be done without writing any custom code at all by using the default service providers included with ASP.NET.

ASP.NET AJAX builds on the application services to expand their use beyond the server. By opening them up as Web services, they can be called remotely and leveraged from JavaScript code executing in the browser. The Microsoft AJAX Library includes scripts that make it easy to authenticate users, store and retrieve profile information, and manage user membership in roles defined on the server.