Frank:

You Stated:

I don't think this is a true statement.  If it was stated here, someone please cite a link back to that thread.  The membership/security model, as far as I can see, is the same between VWD and VS.  It's all 2.0.  Those controls - and all the controls - were meant for production.  This is not a toy, folks.

I have reread the original MS comment that I was referencin, and I think I overstated it a little.  I may be a little foggy about what they are saying.

Please find MS's quote and link to the whole article below.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa478947.aspx

With the release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, there is no "out of the box"
solution for maintaining the Membership and Role databases in Microsoft IIS.
This is a problem when you move your application from development to a production IIS server.
The utility that Microsoft provides, ASP.NET Web Configuration, can be run only in a development,
 non-production environment. This article and its associated code solve this by
implementing a three-tier solution to Member and Role management while using standard Microsoft
ASP.NET tools. This means that it will run in any ASP.NET 2.0 environment, including IIS.
The solution is flexible and very easy to add to any existing ASP.NET 2.0 website project.