Profiles are supposed to be easy in ASP.NET 2.0. You just add a section in your web.config like so:

      <profile defaultProvider="CustomizedProfileProvider">

        <providers>

              <add name="CustomizedProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider" connectionStringName="MyConnectionString" applicationName="/MyApplicationName" />

        providers>

        <properties>

              <add name="MySetting" type="int16" defaultValue="10" />

        properties>

      profile>

... after which ASP.NET 2.0 generates a nice strongly typed class for you so you can access your settings like so:

short x = Profile.MySetting;

Unfortunately, the strongly typed class is generated into your App_code folder. And if you have happened to use the VS2005 Web Application Projects Add-in, you won't have an App_code folder, which means you won't have access to the Profile strongly typed object.

There are two ways around this problem that I know of:

(1) there is another add-in called the WebProfile Generator just for these circumstances.

(2) if you can live with "loosely typed" Profile access, you can just code against a ProfileBase instance like so:

ProfileBase profile = ProfileBase.Create(Membership.GetUser().UserName);

short newSetting = 42;

profile.SetPropertyValue("MySetting", newSetting );

profile.Save();