G. Andrew Duthie from Microsoft had a great presentation on customizing the membership provider at the Richmond .NET User Group meeting last Thursday. In reference to my earlier post, I was on the wrong track; the answer isn't to change the behavior of the default provider or add extra user properties as profile settings, you need to create your own custom provider. The help talks about creating a custom provider when you use a datastore that isn't supported out-of-the-box (like Oracle). While that is true, its also appropriate to create a custom membership provider when you want to integrate the new membership features into your existing data model. This includes interfacing with your own business objects as well (woo hoo!) Basically, you implement the MembershipProvider interface in a custom class that has knowledge of your data model and "translates" it so you can use the various membership controls that ship with Visual Studio 2005. I've completed this in a basic form without too much heartache and will post code once its further along.