Learning ASP.NET 3.5, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Personalization

As your site grows, and you have lots of information available, you’ll find that many users will only want to make use of a subset of what you have available. Say you have a site that offers news articles from around the world. Some users might only want to see news from their home countries; others might want only financial news; others might want just the headlines. In short, you want your site to display different things to different users, based on the user’s preferences. You can do that with ASP.NET, and it’s called personalization.

Personalization allows users to modify a site’s settings to reflect their own tastes. It also allows you to keep track of users’ “progress” through a sequence of steps or selections made on a page from one visit to another. Many sites use personalization to create persistent wish lists, shopping carts, and so forth. This used to be a huge and complicated job—keeping track of a user’s set of preferences and the state of a user’s personal information. Fortunately, that is all made easier now with ASP.NET.

In this chapter, you’ll build on the project from the previous chapter because the mechanisms for security and personalization both make use of user logins. You’ll enhance your site by letting users enter personal information that you’ll store and produce on demand, and you’ll learn how to provide content for users who’d rather remain anonymous. Finally, you’ll modify the appearance of the controls on your site with themes, ...