Claims-Based Authentication and Authorization

The out-of-the-box authentication and authorization mechanisms for ASP.NET are old and haggard. I never really cared for the membership provider. Fortunately, Microsoft has developed an alternative for authentication and authorization, with claims-based security, which is now part of the System.IdentityModel namespace. And there are a few very smart people out there who have developed some open source projects which makes it easy to use claims-aware authentication and authorization.