<p>When overriding the MembershipProvider and calling it directly, is there a way to fill the NameValueCollection config parameter of the Initialize method without manually looking through the config file for the settings?  </p>

<p>Obviously this Initialize is being called by asp.net and the config is being filled somewhere. I have implemented my own MembershipProvider and it works fine through the build in controls.
I would like to create a new instance of my provider and make a call to it directly, but I don't really want to parse the .config for the MembershipProvider, it's connection string name and then the connection string if it's already being done somewhere.</p>

Not sure why you want to create a new one, but if you create it yourself, you'll need to read the web config and get the values yourself to pass to Initialize() as this is done outside the class.  I'm sure, though, that there is already a section handler for this section so it should be just a matter of doing:
```
```
MembershipSection section  = WebConfigurationManager.GetSection("membership");
```
```
Then find your provider and accessing its properties to construct the NameValueCollection.  I don't think you will have to write any code to parse the configuration section.
Here is the
MembershipSection
documentation at MSDN.  Drill down from there.