If you’re not aware, a great feature coming in ASP.NET 2.0 allows user profile data to be stored based on a simple config section, with strong typing and design time Intellisense. Thus, you can modify the pieces of information you wish to store about a user, and immediately get Intellisense, strong typing, etc.
However, the Roles feature continues to use string literals to describe roles, such as
if(User.IsInRole(“Admins”))
In a future version, I would like to see a roles config section in which strongly typed roles could be defined. Then, an overload of IsInRole(System.Web.Security.Role) could be added which would look something like:
if(User.IsInRole(Roles.Admins))
I suggested this to Scott Guthrie at the MVP Summit, and I believe it’s on the ‘To-Do’ list, though for what future version I don’t know. Any thoughts on this feature? Love it? Problems with it? Just don’t care? Note that the string literal methods would remain for backward compatibility.