Use ASP .NET's membership system or roll your own?

I'm in the process of designing a fairly large website. Would you use ASP .NET's membership system/provider or create your own system and why?

I've used it in the past, but since I'm given the opportunity to start from scratch with this, I'm wondering what the pro's and con's would be.

Well the pro's are pretty obvious. It offers you a ready component for use to save/retrieve users for your website, it integrates pretty well very easily with Login server controls thus saving you lots of custom code.

As for the con's, you might not find it flexible enough to perform some very specific tasks, it has a learning curve that is you'll have to read a lot to benefit from it for fairly complex tasks.

I think the ideal solution is to use the membership component while still writing custom code. You can extend the membership component by creating a custom provider.

In the end, it all depends on what exactly you want to achieve.

hope this helps.

As a VB/ASP.Net developer also I would recommend writing your own system for user logins because you will get exactly what you want.

Here a simple example:

Namespace Members

Public Class Member
Private Username as string
Private Password as string 'Personally I wouldn't use the string data type for passwords
Private Other_Details as SomeDataType

'Don't use propertys to access the data instead use methods to check the username and password:

Public Function Try_Login(byval Username as string, byval Password as string) as boolean
If (Username = Me.Username) and (Password = Me.Password) then
return True
else
return False
end if
End Function

End Class
End Namspace

The namespace above is very simple but it gives you an idea of how I would program it.

Some things to keep in mind.

1) Don't send passwords as clear text to the server.
2) Remember to encrypt the passwords in the database to something like sha1. People get upset if they find out that you stored their password as clear text in the database.

A good source: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library...