The article is from Microsoft official MSDN site. Forms Authentication Control Flow: In ASP.NET 2.0, the validation of user credentials can be performed by the membership system. The Membership class provides the ValidateUser method for this purpose as shown here: if (Membership.ValidateUser(userName.Text, password.Text)){ if (Request.QueryString["ReturnUrl"] != null) { FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage(userName.Text, false); } else { FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(userName.Text, false); [Read More ...]