As SharePoint and the underlying .NET Framework developed over the years, more readymade controls have become available for us to use in our applications. Such controls allow us to drop common, and often complex, features into our site. For example, if we would like to add user registration and login features (often referred to as personalization and membership) to our site, it is a chore to build everything we require (registration form with validation, login box, password reminder, change password, etc.) each time we build a site. Microsoft has built these controls for us so that we can easily add them to our site. In this chapter, we will examine the use of these controls.

Very occasionally, we find that we are not able to do what we would like to do with the SharePoint configuration that comes "out of the box". A common example of this is using forms authentication in our site. Later on in the chapter, we will also make some configuration changes to SharePoint...