Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 in VB

CHAPTER 21

Profiles

You can store information for the users of your website in a variety of ways. In Chapter 8, you learned how to use techniques such as view state, session state, and cookies to keep track of information for a short period of time. But if you need to store information between visits, the only realistic option is a server-side database. Using the ADO.NET skills you’ve learned so far, it’s fairly easy to save information such as customer addresses and user preferences in a database and retrieve it later.

The only problem with the database approach is that it’s up to you to write all the code for retrieving information and updating ...