title: asp.net mvc session and membership authentication
body: <p>New to MVC, worked a lot with asp.net but never used the built in membership , authentication, authorization stuff before.</p>
  
  <p>I have 2 questions:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>In the asp.net days i would store the logged in user details (username, first &amp; last name, email) in a session (using a custom class)  and just checked that the session["UserDetails"] !=null in each secure page, can i still do that in MVC? (why i'm not doing it with the built in stuff? - move question #2)</p></li>
  <li><p>In my DB i've got a Authors table (with user &amp; pass) which is connected to 20 other tables andi've got a users table (with user &amp; pass) that connects to 1 or 2 tables.
  Say i want to use the built in stuff how can i use to validate the author login and the users login with the same membership provider? and how will i know which is currently logged in the user or the author when calling User.Identity.IsAuthenticated?</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Thanks everyone!</p>