Profiles

Summary

In this chapter, you took a detailed look at the new profiles feature in ASP.NET 2.0. You considered how it works behind the scenes, when it makes the most sense, and how to configure its behavior. Next, you tried out profiles with a full-scale example that stores a user-specific shopping cart.

The final part of this chapter explored how to create a simple profiles provider of your own. Using these techniques, you can overcome many of the limitations of the profiles feature (such as the way it serializes all information into a single, opaque field). The ultimate decision of whether to use profiles or a custom database component still depends on several factors, but with this ability profiles become a valid alternative.