Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 in CSharp and VB Opsylum

648 x CHAPTER 17 PERSONALIZING WEBSITES
The first part of the type attribute looks quite normal. The List class lives in the System
.Collections.Generic namespace so it makes sense that you need to specify that here as well.
However, right after the class name (List) you see `1. This is not a typo, but the .NET way to refer
to generic types in plain text. To define a property that is based on a generic type, you need to use
the back tick (`) followed by a 1. The back tick is usually found to the left of the 1 key on your keyboard.
The `1 is then followed by a pair of square brackets that contains the actual type you want
to use for the list. The type specified in the FavoriteGenres profile property maps to these VB.NET
and C# counterparts:
VB.NET
Dim FavoriteGenres As New List(Of Integer)
C#
List FavoriteGenres = new List();
You see how to make use of this and other profile properties in the following exercises. First, you
learn how to configure Profile in Web.config in the next Try It Out. Later exercises show you how
to work with these properties, and how to use the various methods of the List class.
TRY IT OUT
Creating a Profile
In this Try It Out, you see how to create a profile that is capable of storing a user’s first and last name,
a date of birth, a short biography, and a list of IDs of the user’s favorite genres. This list is later used to
show only the reviews that match the user’s interest.
1. Open the Web.config file from the root of the site and locate the element that was
added by NuGet in an exercise in the preceding chapter. If you don’t have this element yet, refer to
the section “Introducing the Login Controls” in Chapter 16 to learn how to configure your site for
the application services.
2. Add a new element as a direct child of . Make sure you don’t accidentally
add the new element inside the element.
3. Complete the element so it ends up looking like this:
...
4. Save the Web.config. As soon as you save the file, a background process starts to generate a class
file that is used for the profile. After the class file has been created and compiled successfully, you
can access it programmatically through the Profile property of the Page class.