Programming Visual Basic 2005

Create Personalized Web Sites

Now that you have forms-based security working, you know who your user is and can store the user's preferences and, if appropriate, previous choices (e.g., "You have 3 items in your shopping cart").

To get started, you'll want a new project that duplicates the work you accomplished in the previous example. Create a new web site called SitePersonalization and use the CopyWebSite pattern described previously to make a copy of ASPSecurityRoles into the new site (copying over all the files and folders from the old site to the new.) Set Welcome.aspx as the Start page, and run the program to make sure you have a working duplicate.

Recording Personalization Information

The simplest form of personalization is to record information about the user, then make that information available whenever the user logs on. This requires a kind of persistence that goes beyond session state. To create true personalization, you'll want to store the user's choices and information in a database that associates the saved information with a particular user, and that persists indefinitely.

ASP.NET 2.0 provides all of the plumbing required. You do not have to design, edit, or manage the database tables; all of that is done for you.

Setting up profile handling

ASP.NET 2.0 has decoupled the Profile API (how you programmatically interact with profile data) from the underlying data provider (how you store the data). This allows you to use the default provider (SqlServerExpress), one of the ...