Using Active Directory Form Based Authentication with Windows Sharepoint Services

Recently we have come into a project that demanded us to implement an Active Directory driven logging mechanism in Windows Sharepoint Services with Forms Based Authentication. The problem took some research and hacking around with some XML but we tackled it pretty quickly.
This text on MSDN helped us out a lot so you should take it as a good read. Creating a WSS site is a clear-cut case, we enabled anonymous access so everyone can get to is and supplied the “ADProvider” as a Membership provider name.  Then you need to edit the web.config document of the site you created (in IIS > root of the site).

Before the <system.web> tags you need something like this.

<connectionStrings>
<add name=”ADService” connectionString=”LDAP://domain.com/Ou=users,DC=domain,DC=com” />
</connectionStrings>

This will point to your container with user accounts.
Inside the <system.web>  and after the <authorization> tags you need to specify your connection.

<membership defaultProvider=”ADProvider”>
<providers>
<add name=”ADProvider” type=”System.Web.Security.ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a”
connectionStringName=”ADService”
connectionUsername=”domain\administrator”
connectionPassword=”password” />
</providers>
</membership>

Now fire up your favorite browser and go to your site, go into the login area and attempt to login with your username (user@domain.com) and password.

You should be up and running now.