Question about the ASP.NET Configuration tool and membership and roles in Internet application

I read the following in an older article from MSDN November 2005:

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.


http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa478947.aspx#asp2memroleman_...


Is it still the practice to create custom ways to accomplish the management of users and roles (3.5 years later)?  

Why would Microsoft have only created a tool for use on the development machine with no wa ...