Bilal Haidar [MVP] : Profile in ASP.NET 2.0

Another Community Night @ Microsoft Office

simple — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 13:55:00 GMT

On Monday, October 3, 2005: I deleivered a 2 and a half hours session on the new Profile Object in ASP.NET 2.0.

The feedback was great, I got like 9/9 evaluation :D

Check the presentation and the demo code @ http://www.lebdev.net

Regards

Profile VS. Session

simple — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 19:41:00 GMT

I would like to point out some of the similarities/differences bewteen both Session and Profile objects:

Profile:

1- Profile object is scoped to a particular user:
Each user of a web application automatically has his own profile.

2- Profile object is persistant:
When you modify the stat os the profile object, the modifications are saved between visits to the website

3- Profile object uses the provider model to store information:
By default, the contents of a user profile are automatically saved to a Microsoft SQL Server Express database
located in App_Data of your web application.

4- Profile object is strongly typed:
Using strongly typed properties has several advantages. For example, you get full Microsoft IntelliSense when
using the Profile object in VS.NET 2005 or Visual Web Developer

Session:

1- Session object is scoped to a particular user:
Each user of a web application automatically has his own Session state.

2- Session object is non-persistant:
When you add an item to the Session object, the items disappear after you leave the Web site.

3- Session object uses three different ways to be stored:
    3.1: In Process - default
    3.2: State Server (Out of Process)
    3.3: SQL Server

4- Session object is not strongly typed:
Sessopn object is simply a collection of items.

Hope you enjoyed the post.

Regards

Profile & Anonymous State

simple — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 18:59:00 GMT

I was exploring today Profile and how to work with them.

I notice something which I would like to share it with you.

Suppose we have the following configuration section:

<authentication mode="Forms"/>
        <anonymousIdentification enabled="true"/>

        <profile enabled="true">
            <properties>
                <add name="ZipCode" type="int" />
                <add name="EmailAddresses" type="System.Collections.Specialized.StringCollection" serializeAs="Xml" />
                <group name="Address">
                    <add name="Street" type="System.String" />
                    <add name="City" type="System.String" />
                    <add name="State" type="System.String" />
                    <add name="CountryOrRegion" type="System.String" />
                group>
            properties>
        profile>

FormsAuthentication is used, Anonymous Identification is enabled. Keep in mind that the first time the page executes you are considered an anonymous user.

Inside the code, you can set the value for Profile.EmailAddress.Add(”...”), despite the fact that:

1- You did not add allowAnonymous to the field EmailAddresses.

2- Whatever the value of AnonymousIdentification's value (enabled/disabled) is.

However, you cannot set the value for any of the group profile members without having to explicitly add the allowAnonymous field to any of the properties of the group, despite the fact you have enabled AnonymousIdentification.

Strange ha?

Regards