If you are looking for an easy way to style the ASP.net Login Control and don’t want to use all the built-in control properties because you want unfettered access to all the elements that make up the Login Control all you have to do is the following.

1. Open the ascx or aspx page which holds the Login Control.
2. Switch to design view.
3. Right-click the actual Login Control on the design surface and in the context menu select “Convert to Template”.

Visual Studio will automatically add the “LayoutTemplate” element to the Login Control markup and populate it with all the controls and elements that made up the control as it was setup at the time of conversion.
You now have access to everything you need to extensively style the Login Control to your liking.

In order to stop malicious applications (robots) from submitting your forms over and over again creating extremely painful data and performance problems the best thing you can do is add captcha to your forms.

Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. It uses an image containing deformed text which is impossible for computers to read but can be deciphered by a human. When submitting a form the user must enter the text correctly which is validated by the Captcha control. If the text is correct the validation passes if not it fails. When the validation fails the form cannot be submitted.

A nice free Captcha library and services is the ReCaptcha services which is completely free and extremely easy to use.

1. Download the library

2. Register for an API key

3. Add a reference to that library

4. Register the control on the page

5. Add the control to the page

<recaptcha:RecaptchaControl
      ID="recaptcha"
      runat="server"
      PublicKey=""
      PrivateKey=""
      />
6. Validate the ReCaptcha control in a form event

            recaptcha.Validate();

            if (!recaptcha.IsValid)

            {

                e.Cancel = true;

            }

            else

            {

                recaptcha.Visible = false;

            }

	

By default ASP.net expects to find the Login.aspx page in the root directory of the application. When a request comes in for a protected resource and the user is not authenticated or authorized to access that resource it will automatically redirect the user to /Login.aspx so the user can login.
Personally I do not like to place all of my Membership pages in the root of the application. I like a little order to my madness and prefer to place the Login.aspx page in a folder like Registration which is publicly accessible. But if you try to place the Login.aspx page in any folder except the root of the application you will see an error stating the page cannot be found when you try to access a protected resource. This is because of the default settings discussed above.
To fix this you simply need to alter the default setup for Forms Authentication by adding some configuration entries to your web.config as follows.

    <forms loginUrl="/Registration/Login.aspx" 
           protection="All" 
           timeout="30" 
           name="AppNameCookie" 
           path="/FormsAuth" 
           requireSSL="false" 
           slidingExpiration="true" 
           defaultUrl="default.aspx"
           cookieless="UseCookies"
           enableCrossAppRedirects="false"/>

• loginUrl: allows you to alter the default location of your Login.aspx page

You can look up the rest of the attributes by going to the MSDN documentation for ASP.net Membership.