ASP.NET built in user profile vs. old style user class/tables

Question

I am looking for guidance regarding the best practice around the use of the Profile feature in ASP.NET.

How do you decide what should be kept in the built-in user Pr

Answer 1

I think that depends on how many fields you need. To my knowledge, Profiles are essentially a long string that gets split at the given field sizes, which means that they do not scale very well if you have many fields and users.

On the other hand, they are built in, so it's an easy and standardized way, which means there is not a big learning curve and you can use it in future apps as well without needing to tweak it to a new table structure.

Rolling your own thing allows you to put it in a properly normalized database, which drastically improves performance, but you have to write pretty much all the profile managing code yourself.

Edit: Also, Profiles are not cached, so every access to a profile goes to the database first (it's then cached for that request, but the next request will get it from the database again)

If you're thinking about writing your own thing, maybe a custom Profile Provider gives you the best of both worlds - seamless integration, yet the custom stuff you want to do.