When building web sites in ASP.NET 2.0 that use the membership features you're inevitably going to use the Profile to store some custom properties (you know the stuff; Address, email, Theme, etc). You're probably also going to have an 'update your settings' type page to allow users to edit their profile properties, so you code a page with a bunch of TextBox controls, setting their values from the Profile, then a button to update the profile from the entered data. It's just a bit tedious, especially if these controls are within a template, where you end up doing a ton of FindControl. Ugh.

So in an attempt to make the code easier I've created a ProfileDataSource control, which simply iterates through the custom Profile properties and exposes them as a data source. This allows you to use a DetailsView (or FormView) to provide the display/edit features.

The data source is pretty simple, and hasn't had much in the way of testing, but works fine. If you intend to use it I suggest a thorough test. There are things it does and doesn't do. It does take into account read only properties, so won't update those. It doesn't however, take into account the different between anonymous/authenticated properties. For example, you can bind to all properties and update them while an anonyous user even if those properties are not marked as allowAnonymous. The framework stops the property being updated, but the datasource doesn't. I decided not to impose that as a restriction.

You can get the code from here. There's a test page, along with a couple of ProfileDataSource controls. One is application specific and has the profile properties explicity defined, while the other is generic. I've included both just to show you how it can be done. Just place the .vb files in the Code directory, and register the namespace/tagprefix on the page, and use it like any other data source control.