I'm trying to work on a site that will have a full integration with forums and I've come to a point where I have to decide on whether I should do the old fashion way of registering users or using the built-in ASP.NET membership provider. A lot of people have suggested the membership provider path and I have decided that this is the way to go in this scenario. I've configured a project once before to use this feature but it has been some time and I needed a refresher course on how to get started again. If you're not familiar with it, it is just basically a simple way of adding/registering users into your website seamlessly since ASP.NET create all the tables and relationships and stored procedures in your existing database. The main obstacle is to expand the default fields to suit your site needs in terms of what are required during the sign-up process.
By running aspnet_regsql.exe in your Visual Studio command line (without the parameters) will bring up a familiar wizard where you'll input the necessary database information. After that, the script pretty much takes off and generates the tables, relationships, constraints and the necessary stored procedures in your chosen database (local or remote). The next thing is to set your web.config to authenticate form instead of the default windows credentials. More of that
configuring the database is here. The next step is to configure your web application to use the database and connect to it. More of that can be read
here.
And lastly, although as not as straight-forward,
this article goes beyond the membership profile providers and gives an insight of customizing the profile providers.
Here are some important links for customization: