Develop Provider-Based Features for Your Applications

he ASP.NET Provider Model drives many features within the ASP.NET architecture, yet most developers associate it only with security or membership-related functionality. This article takes you deep into the provider model, so you can see how it's used in a security context. Then it shows you how you to use it to turn any feature in your application into an extensible and swappable component. In fact, I'll even show you why calling it the 'ASP.NET' Provider Model may be a misnomer.

Back when Microsoft released ASP.NET 2.0 (remember those days?), Microsoft rewrote several areas of functionality using a pattern that has become known as the Provider Model. Some of the features existed back in ASP.NET 1.x, others, such as security, were new to the platform. The important aspect is that each of these areas of functionality benefited from something that I find developers often take for granted—the ability to extend and swap functionality when the situation calls for it.