Profile Addendum

There are a couple articles on the web saying you can use a base Profile class like so:

Then use the inherits attribute in web.config like so:

I hope I can save you some time by pointing out the above setup doesn’t work.

You’ll find the HttpContext contains a non-null Profile object, but SQL Profiler will confirm that ASP.NET never populates the object with data from the database. Perhaps the above approached worked in pre-RTM bits, I’m not sure.

Here is a CustomProfile that will fetch and save data properly:

With the above class, Profiler shows the expected “exec dbo.aspnet_Profile_GetProperties” and “exec dbo.aspnet_Profile_SetProperties” commands and it all works as expected.

ASP.NET uses a lazy-load pattern for the Profile object. The runtime doesn’t touch the database until execution first reaches SettingsBase.GetPropertyValueByName (SettingsBase is the parent class of ProfileBase). GetPropertyValueByName will ask the Profile provider to fetch all properties from the database.

The good news is, if a web form doesn’t use any Profile properties, you don’t pay the overhead of a database hit.