ASP.NET 2.0 Profiles and Localization

Personalizing content for individual users and persisting per-user data has always been a non-trivial undertaking in Web apps, in part due to the stateless nature of HTTP. Sites that authenticate users often store personalization data in back-end databases and key it with user names. Sites that don't authenticate users use cookies to round-trip personalization info or keys that can be used to look up personalization info. Either way, most platforms leave the coding to you. ASP.NET 2.0's profile service simplifies the task of storing per-user data. It works with authenticated and unauthenticated users, and it uses the ASP.NET provider model for flexible data storage. You define a user profile; ASP.NET compiles the profile and provides strongly typed access to it. Moreover, ASP.NET persists data written to profiles.