Chapter 12. Profiles, Personalization, and Themes

12. Profiles, Personalization, and Themes

In the previous chapter, you saw how easy it is to implement security features and membership in your Web sites and Web applications with ASP.NET. The built-in membership and roles providers use a database to maintain lists of users and roles (user groups), and the ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool allows you to configure the security system, add and manage users and roles, and link users to the appropriate roles. Meanwhile, the intelligent server controls such as Login, CreateUserWizard, PasswordRecovery, and ChangePassword make it easy to take advantage of the lists of users and roles in your pages.

The provider model that supports membership and roles in ASP.NET also provides the core features required for adding profiles and personalization features to your sites. You can configure a site to recognize users as they log in, and then apply specific properties to the pages they view and the other features of your site or application. You can even arrange for a site to recognize users that have not logged on and are otherwise browsing the site or using the application anonymously.

In this chapter, you will see how the profiles and personalization features in ASP.NET work, how to configure them, and how you can use profiles in your applications. You will generally only use the personalization features with Web Parts, as you will see in the next chapter. Therefore, the topics for this chapter are the following:

• Configuring profiles and personalization

• Enabling profiles and declaring profile properties

• Using the profile system to store dynamic data for users

• Implementing a simple Web site that uses a profile-based shopping cart

• Providing visual personalization using themes

The chapter begins with a walkthrough on setting up the profiles and personalization system for your site.