Both Robert McLaws and Michael Teper have an opinion on the membershipprovider as well.

My response to Robert's post:

Obviously not everybody at Microsoft agrees with on the return types/exceptions issue. In the WSE TokenManager model, an exception is thrown if the tokenmanager is unable to authenticate a user for the service.

My biggest problem with the MemberShipProvider is: it heavily depends on the membershipuser, which is a much too specialized class, I generally don't need :
Comment
CreationDate
Email
IsApproved
IsOnline
LastActivityDate
LastLoginDate
LastPasswordChangedDate
PasswordQuestion

And their related methods.

The other problem is the CreateUserMethod, this takes 7 parameters, of which one out parameter and returns a MemberShipUser... The only 2 parameters I will regularly use are the username and the password. And why doesn't it accept a membershipuser or derived class as inputparameter, now I have to do a cast and fill my custom properties afterwards.

Basically I still believe the providermodel is great, but the membershipprovider-stuff needs some work.