One of the most popular features in ASP.NET 2.0 was the introduction of the "provider model" for the built-in ASP.NET Application Service APIs. The provider model ensures that the storage/implementation for services like Membership, Roles, Profiles, Health Monitoring, Session State, and Site Navigation is extensible, and it allows a developer to easily plug-in alternative implementations if they want.
Earlier this year I blogged about how we shipped the source code for the built-in ASP.NET 2.0 Providers on MSDN, and published 130+ pages of really good documentation that walksthrough their implementation and behavior. If you are looking to adapt the existing providers (which are pretty feature rich and in-depth), then you'll find these whitepapers and source a good resource to check-out. One downside with starting off with the code within the built-in feature-rich/optimized providers, though, is that the source code might be bigger and more complicated then you might like, and the database schema might not map to the database structure you want.
Michal Valasek sent me mail earlier today pointing me at a really cool CodePlex project he has started that provides a simplified set of SQL Provider implementations for the ASP.NET Membership, Roles and Profile APIs. These use a nice straight-forward database schema and can be easily adapted for your application and/or integrated into existing tables you might already have. You can download the source code for them here. I definitely recommend checking them out and bookmarking the project - they provide a really great way to get started with custom providers.
For learning more about the ASP.NET Provider Model, I also recommend checking out a great Code-Camp presentation that Paul Wilson did complete with a nice provider implementation built with his ORMapper that you can download here. You can also find other non-SQL provider implementations (including ones for MySql, SqlLite, Access and more) via my ASP.NET Security Resources Page.
Hope this helps,
Scott
