I have developed a new website using membership and roles. Works fine on local machine, and after getting database permissions right it works on the remote server, i.e. on the web. How do I now maintain/change/delete membership and role information. Do I do it on the local machine using the ASP.Net Configuration tool in VWDE and copy the ASPNETDB.MDF file up to the server? Or do I access the remote site in some way? I have tried loading the remote website into VWDE but the web configuration tool is not then available. Can anyone help?

Yes , you can

prepare your database in VWD locally,

then you can copy the database to production server,

but make sure that you set  the application name(in membership provider settings in web.config) as the same in both environments  ,

 if you didnt change the membership settings, then the application name will be the website name ,

and so you need to make sure that both websites (  on development and production) have the same name,

hope it helps 

That's helpful but I'm still not quite sure what to do. If my production website is www.abc.org.uk, are you saying that if my development site (on local machine) is called abc.org.uk, then copying an updated aspnetdb.mdf file from development to production will work without any other modifications? My present development site is called something different. If I rename it to abc.org.uk will that make the necessary changes to the membership provider settings, or do I need to intervene manually? My web.config file doesn't have any content that appears to refer to membership provider settings - should it?

Hope you can help.

To clarify this thing

please read this blog post :

 Always set the "applicationName" property when configuring ASP.NET 2.0 Membership and other Providers 

In general , i recommened to set the applicationName to value that is the same in production server

 hope that helps