Nearly all developers who’re developing web applications have been working with sessions, cookies, etc.

For example, when you want to authenticate your users you store you user’s authentication information in sessions and cookies. Previously, I posted about ASP.NET Form Authentication which most of ASP.NET developer are working with it because it’s one of the most stable ways for user authentications.

ASP.NET 3.5 provides a new feature named “Personalization” that has very flexible infrastructure enables you to store user’s information in server not client (Cookies store information on client computers). In this post, I’m going to show you how you can use profiles and I’m sure you’ll love it.

ASP.NET has a deep focus on web.config file. You can do lots of things in your configuration file. In order to work with profiles you need to let ASP.NET what user data you want to store. So you have to add some elements to you web.config file:

<system.web>

    <profile>

        <properties>

            <add name="FirstName"/>

            <add name="LastName"/>

            <add name="Age" type="System.Int32"/>

        </properties>

    </profile>

</system.web>

As you can see in the code, you determine what properties your profile should have. You can add them very easily and Visual Studio IntelliSense will help you too.

When you added your custom properties you can see them in code-behind so you can get or set you profile information.

Notice that “Age” property in the above code snippet, I just assigned a type attribute for it. It means that you can also specify the type of a property for example:

· string: System.String

· bool: System.Boolean

· int: System.Int32

· …

You can also assign your custom type. For example, imaging you want to store user’s cart information. You can store information in a class and then set the type of your profile property to that class. Here is an example:

<Serializable()> _

Public Class Cart

    Private _ProductName As String

    Private _Price As Decimal

    Private _Quantity As Int16

    Public Property ProductName() As String

        Get

            Return _ProductName

        End Get

        Set(ByVal value As String)

            _ProductName = value

        End Set

    End Property

    Public Property Price() As Decimal

        Get

            Return _Price

        End Get

        Set(ByVal value As Decimal)

            _Price = value

        End Set

    End Property

    Public Property Quantity() As Int16

        Get

            Return _Quantity

        End Get

        Set(ByVal value As Int16)

            _Quantity = value

        End Set

    End Property

End Class

Note that the class must be Serializable.

Now you can add your property with your custom type:

<add name="Cart" type="Cart" serializeAs="Binary" />

You can also provide default values for your properties. It means if you leave your property with no value, a default value will be replace with null:

<add name="Active" type="System.Boolean" defaultValue="false"/>

It possible to make your properties read-only:

<add name="Active" type="System.Boolean" readOnly="true"/>

Working with new technology is always interesting. Since Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 have been announced, most of developers who are developing with Visual Basic start searching about Visual Basic 10 new features.

About a month ago, Lucian Wischik and Lisa Feigenbaum described about new features in Visual Basic 2010. The show is available for download at MSDN Channel 9 website.

You can check it out by click here.

This is my recommendation: View it!

Using LINQ to XML (XLINQ) will help you to access your XML data very easier, like never before. But I don't know why, using XLINQ in Visual Basic is more interesting than C# for me.

In this post I want to show you how easy can be for VB to generate an XML file than C#.

Assume that we want to generate an XML file like following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<configs>

    <config name="Mohammad Mahdi Ramezanpour"></config>

</configs>

In order to generate such a thing in C#, you will need to write something like this:

XDocument xdoc = new XDocument();

XElement xroot = new XElement("configs");

XElement xitem = new XElement("config", 

                 new XAttribute("Name", "Mohammad Mahdi Ramezanpour"));

xroot.Add(xitem);

xdoc.Add(xroot);

xdoc.Save("C:\\sample.xml");

As you can see, I just created a new XDocument and then add some XElements to it. All things are very routine and then I saved the data into an XML file "C:\sample.xml".

Now, lets check such the code above in Visual Basic:

Dim xdoc As New XDocument

Dim xroot As XElement = <configs></configs>

Dim xitem As XElement = <config name="Mohammad Mahdi Ramezanpour"></config>

xroot.Add(xitem)

xdoc.Add(xroot)

xdoc.Save("C:\sample.xml")

in the code above I created an XML file exactly like our previous exmple and the result will be equal.

Lets take a look at this code snippet; In Visual Basic when you declare a variable as XElement, you can write your XML content exactly like the syntax you're using in an XML file. It means that you can use XML tags (<configs></configs>) straight in your code.

As I said in my previous posts, I like VB more than C# and I thing VB is much powerful than C# at least in this part :).