Using the ASP .NET PROFILE Provider in a WPF application

Question

I've been able to find lots of stuff about using the ASP .NET Membership provider in WPF. I've even got the ASP .NET Role provider working in my WPF application. These are very easy to use in WPF. What I can't find any information about is how to use the ASP .NET PROFILE provider in a WPF application.

My application will be running on a laptop located in a moving vehicle; it cannot use Web Services to connect to a server and authenticate the user. My code needs to be able to retrieve the user's profile information from the local database.

I've tried several times to build a class that derives from ProfileBase but nothing I've tried has worked. To elaborate, the code below is an excerpt from my latest failed attempt:

public class UserProfile : ProfileBase {

    [CustomProviderData( "AlarmsToDisplay;int" )]
    public int AlarmsToDisplay {
        get { return (int) GetPropertyValue( "AlarmsToDisplay" ); }
        set { SetPropertyValue( "AlarmsToDisplay", value ); }
    }

    // Other properties following the same pattern follow.

    private UserProfile() { }

    public static UserProfile GetUserProfile( string username ) {
        return Create( username ) as UserProfile;
    }

    public static UserProfile GetUserProfile( string username, bool isAuthenticated ) {
        return Create( username, isAuthenticated ) as UserProfile;
    }
}

In this code, the method GetUserProfile( string username, bool isAuthenticated ) returns null. I believe this is because the compiler can't cast a ProfileBase to a UserProfile, even though UserProfile descends from ProfileBase. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Can someone point me to an existing article or describe the proper way to build a user profile class that extends from ProfileBase?

Answer 1

I've managed to resolve this issue on my own. Here's what works:

1. Remove the attributes from all of the CLR properties. These do not work with the default aspnet_Profiles table.
2. In app.Config, you need to add an "inherits" attribute to the tag. This has to be set to the fully qualified name of your class, separated from the assembly file name (no extension) by a comma.

Once these things were done, the GetUserProfile method and the ProfileBase class's Create methods return UserProfile objects.