the easiest way is to enable asp.net membership provider, it creates all the required tables and procedures for you. drag and drop create user wizard to your webform, then run the page. when you create your first user, asp.net creates the membership tables in your AppData folder. then drag and drop a login control, when you enter the credentials that you previously registered, you will see that login successes or fails.

that simple eh ? many thanks for your reply. Does this method provide a means of edting login credentials? For example if I have an administrator user type and a general user type, the admin should be able to edit the general user

Yes, you have all the controls in your Toolbar if you are using Visual Studio 2005, or 2008.

hmm ok thanks fo your ideas both of you. however what serkansendur has suggested is great but I do not want to create users onthefly. I want to have a prebuilt DB to validate against you see. any suggestions ?

hi majestic0110,
There is ASP Login Control exists in VS 2005 OR VS 2008, but you still want to use traditional database technique to design login control. For this, i have one article which help's you a lot.
Just check this link, hope this will help you.

http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/100500-1.shtml

If problem persist then feel free to share with us.
Thanks & Regards
Dilip Kumar Vishwakarma
Programmer
.Net Consulting

Everything you can do with login controls,can be done programmatically. To create users belonging to different groups, you must enable roles. Then programmatically you can add users to those roles. Also you can use create user wizard to set user roles. Add an extra step to create user wizard and add a checkbox there determining whether the user is an admin or not. Create user wizard is derived from wizard control so it can be added as many steps as wanted

ok, basically you need to modify your web.config file's <authention element. set the authentication type to Forms. then create your own login page using your own textboxes. query your database with the credentials, if the credentials match then in the button_click handler of your login button add this code : FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage(string username,bool createPersistentCookie); if you want you can add a checkbox so that user credentials be remembered. pass the checkbox.checked value to createPersistentCookie parameter.

the trouble I am mainly having is in connecting to the Db. When I use the WAT utility I keep getting error messages saying I am not connected to db

you dont have to use WAT, you can manually configure the web.config file. google search the element name like <authentication or just type web.config authentication or so.