Newbie authentication question

[Bit Byte]

I am new to the world of Web development - although I have several years
in desktop application development (C/C++). I am trying to get my head
around key concepts such as authentication, object life cycle etc, and I
seem to be going round in circles. Specifically, I am contemplating how
to do this:

1). Create a website that has role based authentication (forms based) -
i.e. a user enters username/pwd to logon
2). User is shown a set of pages based on his/her role (determined from
login details) - for example admin users have access to admnistrative pages

I was thinking of implementing the Authenication etc by means of an
Application class (a Singleton), and then basically routing all of the
users actions (i.e. clicks etc) through the Application class, which
will check that the user has the permision to do that (ok I am being
paranoid and I don't consider 'hiding' pages/forms etc based on a user's
role sufficient).

The question is this:

1). Is a singleton the appropriate design for this?.
2). Will there be one instance of Application class that will handle all
website users 'requests' or will there be one Application object per
user - since (presumably?) different users run in different
threads/processes ?

Suggestions/tips please ....

 

[Guest]

ASP.NET 2.0 already has built-in Membership, Roles and Profile providers for
handling all these functions. It's all configured in the web.config. You can
also roll your own custom providers that derive from the base classes in the
framework.
Peter