Summary

This chapter closely follows the previous chapter in that it continues the discussion and demonstrates the usage of the security, membership, roles, profiles, and personalization features of ASP.NET. In the previous chapter, you saw how to set up, manage, and use membership and roles to control access to all or parts of your Web sites and Web applications. In this chapter, you saw how the underlying user identity and authentication features support other high-level capabilities such as profiles and personalization.

This chapter looked specifically at profiles and their usage for "personalization" in its most generic senseallowing anonymous visitors and registered users to change the appearance and behavior of a site. However, personalization in its more exact definition in ASP.NET refers to a specific set of features that apply generally only to Web Parts. You will see more about this in the next chapter.

What you have seen here, however, is how you enable and configure both profiles and personalization. After that, the chapter concentrated on the profile features of ASP.NET by demonstrating how you create a set of profile properties, apply them to users, store information specific to users, and use this information when users revisit the site in the future.

Finally, the chapter concluded with a look at a specific area of general personalization in terms of changing the appearance of controls, pages, and whole Web sites through the application of themes and skins. Themes and skins are not specifically part of the profile or personalization features of ASP.NET, because you can use them just to create the desired appearance for your site or application without implementing any of the other features in this or the previous chapter. However, they do work well as part of the profiles system by allowing visitors to choose the look and feel they want.