Role Provider in SimplerMembership - simplemembership

Question

I used the standard VS 2012 MVC 4 Internet template in a .NET Framework 4 project. I was mainly using External Logins (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter) to access the parts of my application which are decorated with the [Authorize] attribute.
[One thing I noticed is that the default web.config created by VS does not contain any sections on membership or role providers, unlike those I see in an ASP.NET web form application.]
I deployed the project to an azurewebsites.net site. Things worked fine initially, but after some use, the app will throw an exception because it tried to use the server's machine config file to access SqlMembershipProvider using a connection string called LocalSqlServer.
Q1: How does SqlMembershipProvider relate to the SimpleMembership provider?
Anyway, I created an <membership> section in web.config and added <clear/>. This solved the that problem but created another problem, as now it tried to access SqlRoleProvider in machine.config using the connection string LocalSqlServer, again! I tried to add a <roleManager> section with a <clear/> to my web.config, but I was not as successful. It insists on a defaultProvider to be included. What should I put?
Q2. What is the assembly to use for the SimpleMembership role provider in .NET Framework 4.0 MVC 4 application?
I tried:
System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a
but it created another problem, that it Could not find stored procedure 'dbo.aspnet_CheckSchemaVersion'. Before I run aspnet_regsql.exe I would like to ask:
Q3: Why does the standard app work fine for some time and then start looking for SqlMembershipProvider and SqlRoleProvider?
Is there someone playing around with the settings on the server?

Answer 1

Here is what your web.config settings should look like when using SimpleMembership.
<roleManager enabled="true" defaultProvider="SimpleRoleProvider">
<providers>
<clear/>
<add name="SimpleRoleProvider" type="WebMatrix.WebData.SimpleRoleProvider, WebMatrix.WebData"/>
</providers>
</roleManager>
<membership defaultProvider="SimpleMembershipProvider">
<providers>
<clear/>
<add name="SimpleMembershipProvider" type="WebMatrix.WebData.SimpleMembershipProvider, WebMatrix.WebData"/>
</providers>
</membership>
The assembly that contains the SimpleMembership role provider is WebMatrix.WebData.
SqlMembershipProvider is not related to SimpleMembership except that they are both membership providers. My guess is that if SimpleMembership is not configured correctly it is defaulting to a SqlMembershipProvider.
Somewhere in your application you need to initialize the database for SimpleMembership by calling WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection. The first parameter in this method indicates what connection string to use. If the application was created using the MVC4 Internet template this method is called in the filter InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute which is decorated on the Account Controller. If you need to add a call to the InitializeDatabaseConnection method yourself I would just put it in the Gloaba.asax Application_Start method.