New Security Management Features

In Chapters 4 and 6, you'll see how ASP+ implements several new ways to manage security in your pages and applications. As in ASP 3.0, the Basic, Digest and NTLM (Windows NT) authentication methods can be used. These are implemented in ASP+, using the services provided by IIS in earlier versions of ASP. There is also a new authentication technique called Passport Authentication, which uses the new Managed Passport Profile API. It's also possible to assign users to roles, and then check that each user has the relevant permission to access resources using the IsCallerinRole method.

An alternative method is to use custom form-based authentication. This technique uses tokens stored in cookies to track users, and allows custom login pages to be used instead of the client seeing the standard Windows Login dialog. This provides a similar user experience to that on amazon.com and yahoo.com. Without this feature, you need to write an ISAPI Filter to do this – with ASP+ it becomes trivially simple.

Server-Side Caching

ASP+ uses server-side caching to improve performance in a range of ways. As well as caching the intermediate code for ASP pages and various other objects, ASP has an output cache that allows the entire content of a page to be cached and then reused for other clients (if it is suitable).

There is also access to a custom server-side cache, which can be used to hold objects, values, or other content that is required within the application. Your pages and applications can use this cache to improve performance by storing items that are regularly used or which will be required again. The cache is implemented in memory only (it is not durable in the case of a machine failure), and scavenging and management is performed automatically by the operating system.