On March 2, 2005 the ASP.NET 2.0 On Tour came to Belgium, Brussels. This is an international tour, all about the latest Microsoft technology, featuring speakers such as David Platt and Dave Webster.

The subjects of this event were about showing what ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 had to offer, and how to migrate to these new products and technologies.

One of the sessions was about “Personalization & Membership in ASP.NET 2.0”, by Gunther Beersaerts and Bart De Smet, which was very nice thanks to the good balance between demos and slides.



They talked about the Membership Service, which takes care of the management of users, password generating, validating logins and everything else related to authentication. Other areas of ASP.NET 2.0 they touched were the Role Management Service and the Profile Service.

Trough the Role Management Service, everything related to authorization based on roles can be done in a simple way with static methods to perform key management tasks. While the Profile Service takes care of storing user-specific data persistently in a strongly typed manner, thus making it very easy to customize your site to the logged on user.

This event really gave a good view on what is to come in the web development area.