Roles in ASP.NET

Roles are part of the Authorization in ASPNET i.e. a mechanism to tell if the user has or has not access to resources.

Roles are a mechanism to group users into sets of permissions.

Roles can reuse already existing groups from windows. Roles can also be linked into a SQL database.

Roles are configured on the aspnet websites web.config.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647401.aspx