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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.

Action filters are a powerful feature of ASP.NET MVC controllers that can help you build aspect-oriented Web solutions. In this issue we dive deeper into creating your own dynamic action filters.

In the last issue, I introduced you to the basics of incorporating SQL Server Reporting Services into your ASP.NET MVC applications. In this issue, I’ll finish the series by illustrating how we can transfer data between the ASP.NET MVC context and the SSRS report context. In addition, I will also cover deployment issues such as authentication.

As developers are just getting used to ASP.NET MVC 2 and Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft has already planned and released a preview of the next version of ASP.NET. What started out as “just another option” for ASP.NET developers has become the programming style of choice for developers writing .NET applications for the web.

The HTML markup of a web page includes the page's textual content, semantic and styling information, and, typically, several references to external resources. External resources are content that is part of web page, but are separate from the web page's markup - things like images, style sheets, script files, Flash videos, and so on. When a browser requests a web page it starts by downloading its HTML. Next, it scans the downloaded HTML for external resources and starts downloading those.

A page with many external resources usually takes longer to completely load than a page with fewer external resources because there is an overhead associated with downloading each external resource. For starters, each external resource requires the browser to make an HTTP request to retrieve the resource. What's more, browsers have a limit as to how many HTTP requests they will make in parallel. For these reasons, a common technique for improving a page's load time is to consolidate external resources in a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests that must be made by the browser to load the page in its entirety.

This article examines the free and open-source ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework, which is a project developed by Microsoft for improving a web page's load time by consolidating images into a sprite or by using inline, base-64 encoded images. In a nutshell, this framework makes it easy to implement practices that will improve the load time for a web page that displays several images.

The Chart Web control makes it easy to display a chart in an ASP.NET web page - simply drag the Chart control onto the page, set a few properties and either bind it to a data source control or write a few lines of code that get and bind the data of interest. When a page with a Chart control is visited by a user, the Chart control renders an <img> element on the page that displays the rendered chart.

The Chart control is great for displaying a chart on a web page, but what if a user wants to view that chart offline, or send the chart to a colleague? In an earlier installment, Programmatically Generating Chart Images, we examined a number of ways to generate the chart image programmatically. This technique is useful if you want to modify the chart image before displaying it (to, say, add a watermark) or if you want to send the chart to a recipient via email. This technique can also be used to allow the visitor to export the chart image into an alternative format.

This article shows how to let users export a chart from a web page to an alternative format. Specifically, we'll look at adding an "Export" button to the chart web page that, when clicked, exports the chart displayed in the web page to either an image file that can be downloaded or as a PDF file.

An ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extender to enhance the ASP.NET GridView to page, select, delete, edit and sort rows with keyboard shortcuts.

Implementation approach of a domain independent Single Sign On (SSO) for Asp.net applications

Demonstrates an e-commerce style grid with product comparison checkboxes, sorting, images in a database, expandible/collapsible product summary, selectable row display, and product comparison page.

Here’s an in-depth exploration of a powerful feature of ASP.NET MVC controllers that can greatly help you in the building of aspect-oriented Web solutions.