ASP.NET Membership Providers - Avoid setup in web.config

I have a multi-tenant application where each tenant will have their own database. The ASP.NET MVC3 web application will look at the username passed in and determine which customer database to use to authenticate the user.

I can get this to work if I add multiple connectionStrings / membership Providers, I can get 开发者_如何学编程it to work.

I'd like a way to remove the dependency on the web.config.

Is there a way to configure SqlMembershipProviders via code and not tie myself to a web.config file? I'm thinking I could do it with a custom provider that I write, but would like to see if there was a way before heading down that road.

I've become less of a fan of using the ASP.NET Membership provider for my MVC projects that deal with user data in other ways. Instead, I use forms authentication and incorporate the password hash and salt as columns in my user database (similar to the schema) then manually set the forms authentication cookie.

This is actually not dissimilar from what the default MVC project scaffolding sets up. I just didn't like having to correlate my user records with ASP.NET membership records and I didn't make use of the associated profile or role capabilities.

If you go this route, then you have some options as to how to handle a multi-tenant scenario, but I seriously doubt you'll be able to (or want to, for that matter) get rid of the web.config altogether.

For some multi-tenant ideas, check out my answer in this SO question: SaaS: one web app to one database VS. many web apps to many databases