ASP.NET Profile Provider: is it a value-add?

Question

I've been trying to write an open-source profile provider to work against PostgreSQL (I was frustrated with the limitations and incompleteness in the other projects I'd seen available), but the documentation and examples of how people use it was surprisingly sparse. Even the SO tag for asp.net-profiles has a little over 100 questions associated.

The more I dig in to making it work, the less and less practical it seems; the value added does not seem to justify the complications associated; additionally, it only seems to work on a limited scope of web projects without a bunch of extra work.

I feel like I'm being led to the conclusion that it is not a popular technology, and that there are better ways to persist a more robust user-based information set.

Is my take on this fundamentally flawed? Is this widely used? I'm on the cusp of abandoning my profile provider as it seems to offer little of value.

Answer 1

No, the Profile system in asp.net is not widely used, primarily because of the reasons you mention. It's just not useful for a lot of people.

The easiest solution is to simply create a profile table in your app, then key it on the ProviderUserkey of the Membership system.

Answer 2

I have always eschewed the ASP .NET Membership provider in favor of a custom implementation of IPrincipal for one simple reason. I've almost never needed the out-of-the-box functionality it provides.

Any custom implementation means creating your own implementation of MembershipProvider. Amongst other methods that I have never implemented, it includes wonders like RequiresQuestionAndAnswer and MaxInvalidPasswordAttempts. It forces an implementation upon you that you might not need and will take you more time to complete properly.

Sure, you could cheat and put a NotImplementedException in methods that you're not particularly bothered about, but what right-minded coder would feel comfortable with that in a production system? :D

I really like a lot of Microsoft's stuff, but my experience is that a lot of their "out-of-the-box" solutions are fine in vanilla mode, but the wheels tend to come off when you travel off the beaten path. A bit of cherry-picking is therefore required. My advice? Leave this one on the vine.