Dot Net Code Security Question:

With the large amount of business being done on the web, security is vitally important for protecting not only confidential information such as credit card numbers, but also users’ personal details and preferences. Thus, most of the web applications require the capability to authenticate users on their web sites. Although this was easy to do in ASP.NET 1.x, you still had to write code. With ASP.NET 2.0, things have changed for the better. For security-related functionalities, ASP.NET 2.0 introduces a wide range of new controls:

<asp:Login>: Provides a standard login capability that allows the users to enter their credentials
<asp:LoginName>: Allows you to display the name of the logged-in user
<asp:LoginStatus>: Displays whether the user is authenticated or not
<asp:LoginView>: Provides various login views depending on the selected template
<asp:PasswordRecovery>: Provides the web site administrators with the capability to email the users their lost password

The login controls described here abstract most of the common tasks for which developers have to manually write code for a secured web site. Although this could be achieved in ASP.NET 1.x, you still had to add controls manually and write code. Apart from providing the user interface, ASP.NET 2.0 also provides the capability to retrieve and validate user information using Membership functionality. To this end, ASP.NET ships with a new Membership API, the aim of which is to abstract the required membership functionality from the storage of the member information.