34.10. Understanding the ASP.NET Profile API
So far you have examined numerous techniques that allow you to remember user-level and application-level bits of data. However, these techniques suffer from one major limitation: they exist only as long as the user is in session and the web application is running! However, many web sites require the ability to persist user information across sessions. For example, perhaps you need to give users the ability to build an account on your site. Maybe you need to persist instances of a ShoppingCart class across sessions (for an online shopping site). Or perhaps you wish to persist basic user preferences (themes, etc.).
While you most certainly could build a custom database (with several stored procedures) ...
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