Describe the Provider Model in ASP.NET 2.0?

The Provider model in ASP.NET 2.0 is based on the Provider Design Pattern that was created in the year 2002 and later implemented in the .NET Framework 2.0.

The Provider Model supports automatic creation of users and their respective roles by creating entries of them directly in the SQL Server (May even use MS Access and other custom data sources). So actually, this model also supports automatically creating the user table's schema.

The Provider model has 2 security providers in it: Membership provider and Role Provider. The membership provider saves inside it the user name (id) and corresponding passwords, whereas the Role provider stores the Roles of the users.

For SQL Server, the SqlMembershipProvider is used, while for MS Access, the AccessMembershipProvider is used. The Security settings may be set using the website adminstration tool. Automatically, the AccessMembershipProvider creates a Microsoft Access database file named aspnetdb.mdb inside the application's App_Data folder. This contains 10 tables.