What is the use of User Profiles in ASP.NET

The membership features in ASP.NET 2.0 let you collect basic user information that is important for authentication, such as username, password, e-mail address, and a secret question/ answer pair for password retrieval. But often you will need to collect and store additional information, such as first name, last name, Web site or Weblog URL, job title, and possibly much more. The new user profile features in ASP.NET 2.0 give you the ability to define additional pieces of information about a user that your application must store. You simply specify in web.config the pieces of information you require and then populate the corresponding fields in a special Profile object at runtime.

The Profile object that ASP.NET 2.0 generates is specific to your application and contains strongly typed properties that map to the entries in your applications web.config file. The Visual Studio IDE reads these entries at design time and builds a specialized class (inherited from HttpProfileBase) automatically so that your application-specific properties are available in the Intellisense menu and can be verified by the compiler.