Roll your own custom MembershipProvider and use it with SharePoint for Forms Based Authentication

Updated 02/09/2008

Nothing new here, I think its a pretty well known fact that you can roll your own MembershipProvider and use that with SharePoint to do FBA, if it is news then even better, your learning! 

For a potential client of ours, they want to do FBA on SharePoint and they have a custom backend user management tool.  So naturally, I'm going to have to write a custom provider for this.  I've done this before in the past, but I always find myself referring to Dave Mann's posting on the subject.  Since I don't want to reinvent the wheel here and frankly I don't have anything new/profound to say on the subject, I'll just refer you to Dave's stellar posting about writing your own provider and using it for FBA in SharePoint.

http://www.kcdholdings.com/blog/?p=113

Dave's blog is also filled with great SharePoint knowledge, so I encourage you to check out his site.

Update (02/09/2008):

Since it had been quite awhile since I had to write a custom forms based authentication provider, I realized that Dave's article above doesn't give you everything you need to implement a solution.  His article is only about MembershipProviders....there is still potentially a RoleProvider that you have to write (unless you want to manually add every FBA user by hand and set their permissions in SharePoint....that is a very BAD idea).

So, to supplement Dave's article I wanted to provide you with a few more links giving you more start to finish steps.

In a nutshell, here are the steps to implement a custom Membership Provider, and a custom Role Provider:

• Create your own Membership Provider (only need to implement roughly 7 of the methods since SharePoint only uses those)
• Create you own Role Provider (only need to implement roughly 2 methods since SharePoint only uses those)
• Create an "external" zone for your site
• Add web.config entries to Central Admin, "Internal" site, "External" site, to instruct how to use your custom Membership/Role Providers
• Set your "external" zone to use your custom Membership/Role Providers
• In your "Internal" site, give permissions to your custom Roles, users, etc.
• Test everything by logging into your "External" site and make sure that all your roles and specific users have the necessary permissions within SharePoint

So here's those links I was referring to.

Andrew Connell's post about FBA : http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/HowToConfigPublishingSiteWithDualAuthProvidersAndAnonAccess.aspx

Dan Attis's 2 part posting about FBA Part 1 : http://devcow.com/blogs/jdattis/archive/2007/02/23/Office-SharePoint-Server-2007-Forms-Based-Authentication-FBA-Walkthrough-Part-1.aspx

Dan Attis's 2 part posting about FBA Part 2 : http://devcow.com/blogs/jdattis/archive/2007/03/01/Office-SharePoint-Server-2007-Forms-Based-Authentication-FBA-w-MySites-Walkthrough-Part-2.aspx

Robert Bogue's Tips/Gotcha's about writing custom FBA : http://thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2007/06/24/664.aspx