A few things from yesterday to note:

The .net ide does need / would be complimented by a suite of 'cooltools' especially a gui based tool for security configs, data binding could be made easier too through automated code plus remember the ol' vb6 ide tool for auto error handling code generation - that ought to be important too

If not using windows based authentication then best method seems to be a login.aspx using soapheaders communicating with a web service that verifies a login via programmer's choice - in most cases a sql back end that holds the user db authenticates and the webservice responds to the uid/pwd combo with a true/false value then the page handels it from there. See quickstart asp+ security.