You can provide users of your Web site with a custom experience by defining and using profile properties. You can use profile properties to track any custom information your application requires, including:

User information, such as an address or city.
Preferences, such as a color scheme or list of stocks to follow.
Custom information about for the current session, such as a shopping cart.

Once you have defined profile properties, ASP.NET automatically associates individual instances of the profile properties with each user, and you can use code to set or get the values. ASP.NET persists property values in a data store (which you can configure), and the next time a user visits your site, ASP.NET automatically retrieves the profile property value for that user.

The topics in this section describe how profile properties work and how to create and manage them.

In This Section

ASP.NET Profile Properties Overview

User Identification for ASP.NET Profile Properties

Defining ASP.NET Profile Properties

ASP.NET Profile Providers

Implementing a Profile Provider

Securing Profile Properties

Reference

System.Web.Profile

Related Sections

ASP.NET State Management: Describes the ways provided by ASP.NET for storing information between page requests.

ASP.NET Web Parts Pages: Describes how to create pages with application features that users can select and customize in a browser.