Fixing up the System.Web.Profile

I am certainly not a wise person. Instead of learning from a Dan Hounshell's struggle, I wasted tons of time, trying to make Microsoft profile work for Web Application Project. Dan gave a perfect description of how I felt after fruitless fighting with MS Profile Provider until smart people (who read more than me) pointed me in the right direction.

To make long story short here is the recipe:

• Decide to utilize Microsoft (widely advertised) Profile feature.
• Use Web Application instead of the native Web Site.
• Fail miserably and admit that you are stupid doing something wrong.

When Microsoft patched a Visual Studio to give an alternative to the hated Web Site application, their developers broke a support for a Profile mechanism. The schema will refuse to function unless you download ASP.NET Profile Generator - it will replace a Web Site's automatic CommonProfile generation. (hurry up - Microsoft is abandoning GotDotNet by the summer 2007).

Even after you successfully generated the profile class, there are still some limitations. You are pretty much safe if the profile properties come from the web.config file:

<profile>
<properties>
   <add name="FirstName" />
   ... etc ...
</properties>
</profile>

It is a little bit more difficult if you want your profile class to be more intelligent. The natural choice is to create your own class and inherit profile:

<profile inherits="MyProject.MyCustomProfile"/>

In this case I would recommend to create the partial class - one part have your custom properties in the following form:

public virtual string FirstName
{
 get
 {
   return ((string)(this.GetPropertyValue("FirstName")));
 }
 set
 {
   this.SetPropertyValue("FirstName", value);
 }
}

and another part will contain the required plumbing provided by the generator.

And the last tip: the Runtime will try to cast your profile class to the ProfileCommon type and fail if you didn't inherit your class from the System.Web.Profile.ProfileBase. Better do it in the generated partial class. The full example of the Web Application Profile class you can download here CustomProfile.cs.

Again - it is a good idea to keep your custom part separated from the generated code so nobody would accidentally regenerate the profile. To make these sad accidents even less likely - do not install the ASP.NET Profile Generator and simply use the example code.