Whats in a MembershipProvider

The SqlMembershipProvider supports three formats for storing passwords: Hashed (the default and most secure format), Encrypted, and Clear. The passwordFormat property specifies how the provider will store passwords, and will impact a number of other membership features.
The enablePasswordRetrieval option determines if the provider will return a user’s password with the GetPassword method.
The enablePasswordReset property controls the ResetPassword API. ResetPassword will assign a new, generated password to a user. The PasswordRecovery control can automatically email the new password to a user. It’s a good practise to set the requiresQuestionAndAnswer property to true to prevent a malicious user from resetting someone else’s password, A value of true means the user has to provide the answer to a security question before resetting their password.
The minRequiredPasswordLength and minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters prevent users from choosing a password like “abc”. If you have additional requirements, you can use the passwordStrengthRegularExpression property to force the password to pass a regular expression test.
The SqlMembershipProvider offers a number of features not shown in the configuration above. I suggest you to explore other properties yourself.
If you want to interact directly with the Membership API, one approach is to use the Membership class from System.Web.Security. The Membership class contains only static members and properties, but these static members map to properties and methods on the MembershipProvider, and the component will forward calls to the configured provider when appropriate. Here is an example using hard coded values for a user's attributes.
An even easier interface to the membership provider is to use the ASP.NET 2.0 Login controls: Login, LoginView, PasswordRecovery, LoginStatus, LoginName, CreateUserWizard, and ChangePassword. The Login control, for example, will ultimately call the ValidateUser method of the current membership provider when a user enter their username and password and clicks the Login button. There is no need to write any code if the built-in controls provide all the functionality you need. All of the controls allow customization various levels of customization through styles and templates. You can find the controls in the Visual Studio toolbox under the “Login” category.