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Using two ASP.NET membership providers

Recently I wanted to give someone access to one of my teaching web sites. They were not a student or faculty member so they didn’t have an account in our active directory. I am not a system administrator so I wasn’t able to add them to the active directory either. The solution was to add a second membership provider to my ASP.NET site. The first membership provider is based on active directory. The new, 2nd provider is a SQL provider. I found a great blog post that had the relevant code for checking the username and password against the second provider: http://www.stevideter.com/2008/03/20/using-two-membership-providers-for-aspnet-logins/.

The code behind for the login page was in C# so I thought I would provide the bare bones Visual Basic equivalent:

Protected Sub Login1_Authenticate(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.AuthenticateEventArgs) Handles Login1.Authenticate

Dim foundUser As Boolean = False

‘this will call the default MembershipProvider
If (Membership.Provider.ValidateUser(Login1.UserName, Login1.Password)) Then
foundUser = True
‘ otherwise, explicitly call secondary provider
ElseIf Membership.Providers(“AspNetSqlMembershipProvider”).ValidateUser(Login1.UserName, Login1.Password) Then
foundUser = True
End If

If (foundUser) Then
e.Authenticated = foundUser
End If

End Sub

The membership section of web.config looks like this:
<membership defaultProvider=”AspNetActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider”>
<providers>
<add name=”AspNetActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider” type=”System.Web.Security.ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a”
connectionStringName=”ADConnectionString” attributeMapUsername=”sAMAccountName” enableSearchMethods=”true”/>
<add name=”AspNetSqlMembershipProvider” type=”System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a” connectionStringName=”LocalSqlServer” />
</providers>
</membership>

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