ASP.NET Membership Providers and Azure

Question

I currently have about 15 Web Forms Application (2.0+) websites on a hosted VM and I need to migrate all my client's sites to Azure shortly. Several of these sites use SQL Server 2008 and the regular ASP.NET Membership Provider (some with custom profiles). All data access in these clients' sites use ADO.NET.

I suspect that I need to upgrade to "Universal Providers", but I am confused by the existence of ASP.NET "Identity" and "SimpleMembership" providers. I'm now looking at three different providers offered by Microsoft. Can someone clarify which to use and which one corresponds to the future direction Microsoft is taking?

If Universal Providers is the correct way to go, does this mean that ADO.NET code will not work? To be specific, will Universal Providers only work with Entity Framework? If this is the case, what is the best migration approach to take short of abandoning Azure completely?

Answer 1

ASP.NET Identity is the recommended membership system going forward. If you want to store the membership system in Azure Table storage then you should consider moving to ASP.NET Identity instead of Universal Providers. Universal Providers are useful if you only want to use Sql Server in Windows Azure.

Answer 2

Can someone clarify which to use and which one corresponds to the future direction Microsoft is taking?

If you are migrating old Membership Provider to new one, ASP.NET Universal Providers will be the closest one (as well as easiest).

does this mean that ADO.NET code will not work?

In Universal Providers, table names doesn't have aspnet_ suffix which is great. However, if your existing project accesses those tables, then you'll need to modify your source code.

will Universal Providers only work with Entity Framework?

Universal Providers uses Entity Framework code first under the hood.

If this is the case, what is the best migration approach to take short of abandoning Azure completely?

As I stated, you can migrate old Membership Provider to new Universal Provider because table are one-to-one except aspnet_ suffix.