Administration and Management

The other option on the Security tab is the Security Setup Wizard. This wizard, shown in Figure 14-19, makes it even easier to set up the users, roles, and rules because it takes you through a step-by-step process.

Figure 14-19

From the first page of the Security Setup Wizard, you see steps listed for a number of different tasks. These steps enable you to select the Windows or Forms authentication, choose the data provider you want to use, define the roles, add users, and then create rules for your application.

Profile

Using the Profile tab, shown in Figure 14-20, you can set up your application to work with the new personalization management system. The personalization system allows you to store unique values for authenticated or unauthenticated users.

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Figure 14-20

The ASP.NET personalization features are enabled by default; therefore, the Enable Profile section lets you disable personalization if you want. It also allows you to enable personalization for anonymous users — something that is disabled by default. With the Manage Profile section, you create, edit, or delete profile properties or groups of properties. The last section, Clean Up (Remove) Data, enables you to set a date when personalization points become stale. This setting removes the personalization points from your data store if they are older than the date specified.

Application

The Application tab, shown in Figure 14-21, enables you to create application settings (key/value pairs), configure site counters, apply settings so your application can send e-mails, as well as modify debugging, tracing, and error page settings.

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Figure 14-21

Provider

The final tab in the Web Admin tool is the Provider tab (see Figure 14-22). You use this tab to set up additional providers and to determine the providers your application will use.

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Figure 14-22

This Provider page is simple, but it contains one important piece of information: the default data provider your application is geared to work with. Figure 14-22 shows that my application is set up to work with the AspNetAccessProvider, the default data provider.

The two links on this tab let you set up either a single data provider (see Figure 14-23) or a specific data provider for each of the features in ASP.NET that requires a data provider.

As you can see from the screen shots and brief explanations provided here, you can now handle a large portion of the necessary configurations through a GUI. You no longer have to figure out which setting must be placed in the web.config file. This functionality becomes even more important as the web.config file grows. In ASP.NET 1.0/1.1, the web.config file possibilities were a reasonable size; but with all the new features now provided by ASP.NET 2.0 the web.config file has the potential to become very large. The new GUI-based tools are an outstanding way to manage it.

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