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

Ive only built 2 applications that used the profile provider. Since then I have stayed away from using it. For both of the apps I used it to store information about the user such as their company name, address and phone number.

This worked fine until our client wanted to be able to find a user by one of these fields. Searching involved looping through every users profile and comparing the information to the search criteria. As the user base grew the search time became unacceptable to our client. The only solution was to create a table to store the users information. Search speed was increased immensely.

I would recommend storing this type of information in its own table.