Pro ASP.NET 4 in VB 2010, Third Edition

Chapter 24. Profiles

In previous chapters, you learned how to use a range of ASP.NET security features. Many of these features are geared to identifying individual users (authentication) and then determining what actions they should be able to perform (authorization). But you need to uniquely identify and authenticate users for another important reason—to keep track of user-specific information.

In ASP.NET 1.x, the only practical option to store user-specific information was to create your own data access component (a topic covered in Chapter 8). Your web page could call the methods of your data access component to retrieve the current user's data and then save any changes. As you'll see in this chapter, this approach still makes a lot of sense ...