Getting started with ASP.NET Identity

In order to understand the many options with ASP.NET/Web Forms/MVC projects and websites, please read this article! Creating ASP.NET Web Projects in Visual Studio...

Authentication Methods (from Visual Studio startup page options)

Visual Studio offers several authentication options for the Web Forms, MVC, and Web API templates:

No Authentication
Individual User Accounts (ASP.NET Identity, formerly known as ASP.NET membership)
Organizational Accounts (Windows Server Active Directory or Azure Active Directory)
Windows Authentication (Intranet)

Configure authentication dialog

No Authentication

If you select No Authentication, the sample application will contain no web pages for logging in, no UI indicating who is logged in, no entity classes for a membership database, and no connection string for a membership database.

Individual User Accounts

If you select Individual User Accounts, the sample application will be configured to use ASP.NET Identity (formerly known as ASP.NET membership) for user authentication. ASP.NET Identity enables a user to register an account, by creating a username and password on the site or by signing in with social providers such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft Account, or Twitter. The default data store for user profiles in ASP.NET Identity is a SQL Server LocalDB database, which you can deploy to SQL Server or Azure SQL Database for the production site.

Advantages of the new Identity code base include the following:

The new membership system is based on OWIN rather than the ASP.NET Forms Authentication module. This means that you can use the same authentication mechanism whether you're using Web Forms or MVC in IIS, or you're self-hosting Web API or SignalR.
The new membership database is managed by Entity Framework Code First, and all of the tables are represented by entity classes that you can modify. This means that you can easily customize the database schema and profile-related web UI to fit your own needs, and you can easily deploy your updates using Code First Migrations.

The new membership system is implemented automatically in the new templates, and it can be implemented manually in any project that targets .NET 4.5 or later.

ASP.NET Identity is a good choice if you are creating an Internet web site which is mainly for external customers. If your organization uses Active Directory or Office 365 and you want to create a project that enables single-sign-on for employees and business partners, the Organizational Accounts option might be a better choice.

For more information about the Individual User Accounts option, see the following resources:

www.asp.net/identity. Documentation about ASP.NET Identity on the ASP.NET web site.
Create an ASP.NET MVC 5 App with Facebook and Google OAuth2 and OpenID Sign-on. Also shows how to customize user profile data.
Web API - External Authentication Services
For previous versions of VS:
- Adding External Logins to your ASP.NET application in Visual Studio 2013

ASP.NET Identity is used in the Visual Studio project templates for ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, Web API and SPA. This article illustrates how the project templates use ASP.NET Identity to add functionality to register, log in and log out a user.

ASP.NET Identity is implemented using the following procedure.

Create an ASP.NET MVC application with Individual Accounts. You can use ASP.NET Identity in ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, Web API, SignalR etc. Here we will start with an ASP.NET MVC application. This works the same way in WebForms applications as well.
The created project contains the following three packages for ASP.NET Identity.
- Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework
  This package has the Entity Framework implementation of ASP.NET Identity which will persist the ASP.NET Identity data and schema to SQL Server.
- Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Core
  This package has the core interfaces for ASP.NET Identity. This package can be used to write an implementation for ASP.NET Identity that targets different persistence stores such as Azure Table Storage, NoSQL databases etc.
- Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.OWIN
  This package contains functionality that is used to plug in OWIN authentication with ASP.NET Identity in ASP.NET applications. This is used when you add log in functionality to your application and call into OWIN Cookie Authentication middleware to generate a cookie.
Creating a user.
Launch the application and then click on the Register link to create a user. The following image shows the Register page which collects the user name and password.

Components of ASP.NET Identity

The diagram below shows the components of the ASP.NET Identity system (click on this or on the diagram to enlarge it). The packages in green make up the ASP.NET Identity system. All the other packages are dependencies which are needed to use the ASP.NET Identity system in ASP.NET applications.