Personalization is growing to be more and more of an essential ingredient in many types of Web apps, including portals and shopping sites. Without it, it's quite difficult to serve your customers efficiently. But building a personalization layer in your presentation tier can be a challenge. You need a persistent storage medium that is easy to manage and does not consume too many resources, you need an API to let page authors interact with the personalization store, and you need a data model that is easy to use and that provides type safety. Finally, you must provide both administrators and end users with tools to manage stored data and settings. As my March 2004 column demonstrated, building a personalization layer in ASP.NET 1.x applications is definitely possible, but is tricky nonetheless. Thankfully, ASP.NET 2.0, provides new facilities to help you build your personalization layer with ease.
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