Using Web.Config for Authentication - ASP .NET Web Application

IDE Used: Visual Web Developer 2008

I think for small web application with a few number of application users, storing login credentials in Web.Config file of the web application should be okay, this may not adhere to .Net Web Application best practices but using a database doesn't make sense. I tried reading encrypted login data from a file but it didn't seem like very portable. For some reason, storing login data in Web.Config looks perfect. So here is how you do it:

1- Open up the Web.Config file of your ASP .Net Web Application
2- Scroll down until you see the xml Authencation tag.
3- Change that to XML below, please use the valid "<" ">" for xml tags. I have used "[" "]" because blogger wouldn't allow me to display XML on pages.

      [authentication mode="Forms"]

        [forms loginUrl="default.aspx"]

          [credentials passwordFormat="Clear"]

            [user name="familyguy" password="peter" /]

          [/credentials]

        [/forms]

      [/authentication]

But for this work, you need to make some more changes to your .Net Class code which controls the behavior of your Login page. But before I go ahead and show the authentication code, the:

username is : familyguy
password is : peter

Following is what I added to my C# code that controls the ASP Login page

if (FormsAuthentication.Authenticate(usernametextbox.Text, passwordtextbox.Text))
{
Response.Redirect("profile.aspx");
}


The first line of the C# code is the method call which returns a boolean. The method takes in username and password entered by the user in the textboxes (input controls) on the login pages, as input parameters.
If the correct username / password, familyguy / peter, is entered, user will gain access to the next page which is "profile.aspx" in my application. Response.Redirect("profile.aspx") in the body of the IF condition of the C# code is responsible for loading the next page in the browser.