Since first using ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6 I’ve been fighting the EF-based Identity framework. I can’t do much about the rather obtuse API, but I can fix the constant moaning about migrations and terrible performance by replacing the EF data stores with something a little (OK a LOT) better. I’m a big fan of the new ‘micro’ ORMs out there like PetaPOCO, Dapper, Massive, etc. They’re extremely easy to use, and incredibly fast – almost as fast as manually typing out ADO.NET commands yourself but without the pain. At work I use NPOCO, which is an extended and in my opinion ‘better’ version of PetaPOCO.
While the API for ASP.NET Identity may be ‘odd’, Microsoft have made it quite easy to extend / change the framework. Removing the hard dependency on Entity Framework is a simple case of replacing the ‘UserStore’ and ‘RoleStore’ with your own implementations. Technically you only have to support the features you’re actually using. But it’s pretty easy to support everything but the ‘Queryable’ functionality, and you do this by implementation various interfaces such as:
- IUserLoginStore<TUser>
- IUserRoleStore<TUser>
- IUserClaimStore<TUser>
- IUserPasswordStore<TUser>
- IUserSecurityStampStore<TUser>
- IUserEmailStore<TUser>
- IUserLockoutStore<TUser>
- IUserPhoneNumberStore<TUser>
- IUserTwoFactorStore<TUser>
Part of the reason the storage API is so over-engineered is so that the system can support both databases and remote services without impacting on performance too much. The disadvantage, ironically, is that performance is slightly lower if you’re using a traditional database as the data store. It also means when using Identity you have to explicitly ask for things, rather than being able to fetch a user and immediately see the available roles for example.
Microsoft have completely open-sourced Identity so you can see the default implementation over at GitHub here. I used this code as the basis for my own implementation. Of particular interest are the UserStore and RoleStore classes in the EntityFramework project.
I’ve open sourced my implementation and made it available on GitHub here. In short you lost almost no functionality, yet gain a staggering performance gain of up to 1,136%. You can easily transition from your current EF version to the new NPOCO version since the DB schema is identical (in fact I’ve just stolen MS’ schema for compatibility purposes). You can still use your own custom user and role classes as long as they inherit from IdentityUser and IdentityRole – just like with the MS EF version.