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Membership, in a nutshell, is a framework build into the .NET Framework that supports creating, authenticating, deleting, and modifying user account information. Each user account has a set of core properties: username, password, email, a security question and answer, whether or not the account has been approved, whether or not the user is locked out of the system, and so on. These user-specific properties are certainly helpful, but they're hardly exhaustive - it's not uncommon for an application to need to track additional user-specific properties. For example, an online messageboard site might want to also also associate a signature, homepage URL, and IM address with each user account.

There are two ways to associate additional information with user accounts when using the Membership model. The first - which affords the greatest flexibility, but requires the most upfront effort - is to create a custom data store for this information. If you are using the SqlMembershipProvider, this would mean creating an additional database table that had as a primary key the UserId value from the aspnet_Users table and columns for each of the additional user properties. The second option is to use the Profile system, which allows additional user-specific properties to be defined in a configuration file. (See Part 6 for an in-depth look at the Profile system.)

This article explores how to store additional user information in a separate database table. We'll see how to allow a signed in user to update these additional user-specific properties and how to create a page to display information about a selected user. What's more, we'll look at using ASP.NET Routing to display user information using an SEO-friendly, human-readable URL like www.yoursite.com/Users/username.

The Membership API in the .NET Framework provides the concept of a user account and associates with it core properties: username, passsword, email, security question and answer, whether or not the account has been approved, whether or not the user is locked out of the system, and so on. However, depending on the application's needs, chances are your application needs to store additional, user-specific fields. For example, an online messageboard site might want to also allow users to specify a signature, their homepage URL, and their IM address.

ASP.NET 2.0 Profile system can be used to store user-specific information. The Profile system allows the page developer to define the properties she wants to associate with each user. Once defined, the developer can programmatically read from and assign values to these properties. The Profile system accesses or writes the property values to a backing store as needed. Like Membership and Roles, the Profile system is based on the provider model, and the particular Profile provider is responsible for serializing and deserializing the property values to some data store. The .NET Framework ships with a SqlProfileProvider class by default, which uses a SQL Server database table (aspnet_Profile) as its backing store.

In this article we will examine the Profile system - how to define the user-specific properties and interact with them programmatically from an ASP.NET page - as well as look at using the SqlProfileProvider that ships with .NET 2.0.