As blogged about by Kent Sharkey, Scott Watermasysk, and others, the Microsoft ASP.NET v1.1 Membership Management Component Prototype has been released. The MMCP provides a set of classes to facilitate membership, role-based authorization, and authenticated and anonymous user profiles. The MMCP sets out to mimic the functionality of the membership and profile capabilities that will be part of ASP.NET 2.0.
Hate to complain, but I have a couple of issues witht he MMCP release as it currently stands:
- There's no documentation or examples. The download includes a Word document that discusses setting up the MMCP - installing the database entities and configuring the Web.config - but there are no code samples or working applications to show off the technology. True, this is being used, supposedly, by DotNetNuke 3.0, so you could download that and poke around the code, but it would be nice to have a very scaled back, working application included in the download.
- No source code is provided, just a pre-compiled assembly. Why not include both the pre-compiled assembly and source, for those that want to study this application in more depth? (Granted, you can just use Reflector, but it would be nice to have a tightly packaged VS.NET project with comments and whatnot.)
- Supposedly the license for using the MMCP is too restrictive. In the MMCP Forums, poster JocularJoe mentions that the EULA prohibits folks from using the MMCP is a production environment. I was unable to find a EULA in the downloaded files myself, so I can't confirm this, but I think what JocularJoe's comment stems from is that in DNN 3.0 there is a EULA with the MMCP that has some pretty limiting verbage.
Keep in mind that the MMCP is a prototype, which means, I suppose, that there will be a non-prototype version released. Hopefully one that has a more clearly defined EULA, contains source, and has some documentation. That's my fervent hope, but, to be honest, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if there was no such final version released. One only has to think back to the IE Web Controls to recall a product that was released as beta, but never had an RTM version. (And a product that had pretty sorry documentation.)