First: After searching for awhile to figure out what’s new/different with MVC 4 and forms authentication, this is the best article I've found on the subject: http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2012/08/29/simplemembership-membership-providers-universal-providers-and-the-new-asp-net-4-5-web-forms-and-asp-net-mvc-4-templates.aspx Some quotes from the article: “The ASP.NET Web Pages team designed SimpleMembership to (wait for it) simplify the task of dealing with membership” "WSAT is built to work with ASP.NET Membership, and is not compatible with Simple Membership. There are two main options there: Use the WebSecurity and OAuthWebSecurity API to manage the users and roles Create a web admin using the above APIs Since SimpleMembership runs on top of your database, you can update your users as you would any other data - via EF or even in direct database edits (in development, of course)" “If you want to use an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider in ASP.NET MVC 4, you can't use the new AccountController. You can do a few things:” “Universal Providers do not work with Simple Membership.” ~ this post (look for Bob.at.SBS’s answer) says Universal Providers is not needed for MVC 4 to work in Azure) I've been trying to figure out the Forms Authentication in MVC4. It's different than the past approach (aspnet_regsql). If you do file new project -> MVC 4 -> internet application, you get a really nice template with the controller and model setup for you. However, the tables are different than using aspnet_regsql and the ASP.Net Configuration tool (WSAT) wasn’t connecting to the data I had (it was creating an App_Data/aspnet.mdf file, which I didn’t see right away). Points of Note The database tables are created in the SimpleMembershipInitializer class, when you first run your app using Entity Framework 5 migration functionality. The tables created are webpages_Membership, webpages_OAuthMembership, webpages_Roles, webpages_UsersInRoles, UserProfile. Web.config settings don’t seem to be needed. Scott Hanselman on Universal Providers was also useful if not somewhat out dated. Universal Providers and SimpleMembership are not compatible. http://www.asp.net/web-pages/tutorials/security/16-adding-security-and-membership – walk-through
