In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to use two different ASP.NET Membership Providers to utilize two separate SQL Server Databases for creating users. By Default, ASP.NET Membership provides you with powerful tools to implement a membership system into your web application.

Even with all the power and functionality we get with the Membership class, it is surprisingly easy to work with and implement, as well as customize. In this tutorial, you will learn how to utilize two SQL Membership Providers to register users for two separate databases.

To start, we will create a new Web Site in Visual Studio, and then click Website > ASP.NET Configuration. Next, select the Security tab and click either the 'Use the security Setup Wizard to configure security step by step' or the 'Select authentication type' link.
Whichever method you choose, you will want to select the Access method 'From the internet'. For this example, we will not enable Roles or create users just yet.

Once we have set the Access method, we can close the browser for the Configuration. You should now notice that Visual Studio has created a database for our Membership. Right-click the App_Data folder in Solution Explorer, then choose Refresh - you will notice a SQL Server database named ASPNETDB.MDF
Before we do anything else, let's Copy and Paste this database in Solution Explorer. Rename the copied database. Because we used ASP.NET Configuration to set-up the Membership class, by default the database being used is the ASPNETDB.MDF
Now to add our Secondary SQL Provider, we will need to edit the Web.config. First, add the connection strings for each database:

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Inside the <system.web> tags, add the following:

Notice that our default provider is the one that ASP.NET created automatically for us. Then we basically just duplicate it.
The next step for us is to create a Register User page. The easiest way to do this is to use the CreateUserWizard ASP.NET control, which can be used with Custom Providers, as they inherit from the default class. Create a Register.aspx and drag on from the Toolbox a CreateUserWizard control. You should have something like this:

If we run this page right now, the Wizard will use the default Membership Provider to create a new user. So let's add an option to choose which provider to use; let's add a RadioButtonList:

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Notice that we have also added an OnSelectedIndexChanged event handler to the RadioButtonList, as well as set AutoPostBack to true. This is because we want to change the Provider when the option is selected. To do this, we simply add the following in the code-behind:

Now when this page is run, we can programmatically set the Membership Provider at runtime, allowing us to add users to two separate ASP.NET Membership tables. To make the process a little cleaner, we could add an AJAX UpdatePanel to mask the PostBack on selecting a Radio option:

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The entire code-behind will look something like this: