How do I use custom member properties for people on my .NET website

I am trying to make an asp.net website using Visual web dev and C# that accesses data in an SQL database. For my site, I need to be able to save and access additional user properties such as age and g开发者_JAVA技巧ender. I have been playing around with the built in .NET Login tools but I don't understand how to keep track of the additional properties (age, gender...) I could store all the users information in my own database but how do I correlate the users data in my DB to the usernames in the member database that is automatically created?

Probably profiles are perfect and quite easy to use for your purpose. ASP.NET manages the relation between users and their associated profile data (which you can customize for your needs) quite comfortable. Here is short introduction video:

http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/video-44.aspx

Are you using an ASP.NET website project or web application project? The video (and most information in MSDN) is related to website projects. For web applications there are some complications to take into account when you use profiles.

(Some hints if you are using a web application project:

How to assign Profile values?

If you are using an website project you can ignore this)

As Slauma said ASP.Net Profiles is a great way to do this using the Membership API.

But I don't like the way profiles use delimited list serialized in the database, and I've heard reports of speed issues under heavy load.

I Use Membership API on just about all applications, except for the profile bit.

To store user profiles, you can create a separate table. Maybe called 'UserProfile'. Add a column with a unique index for 'username' and/or 'email'. Which ever you treat as the user's username. Now you can use that column to pull profile information at runtime.

As a bonus, if you use an ORM like Entity framework, you can now write simple LINQ queries to pull your user information.