ASP.NET Membership Tables

Question

When you create a new ASP.NET internet application, you get the built in membership tables and controllers etc. There are 5 tables created:

UserProfile
webpages_Membership
webpages_OAuthMembership
webpages_Roles
webpages_UsersInRoles

I understand the basic concept of how all these work but I have a question on why is a UserProfile create along with the webpages_Membership? Can't these 2 tables practically be combined together? If that's not how it works, can you explain to me why the 2 files were created.

Answer 1

No, they cannot be combined, because a user profile has nothing to do with membership. Membership is about your user id, password, and authentication. User Profile is about things like name, address, etc..

It's designed this way so that you can extend the user profile to include whatever information you want. While the Membership tables do not change, because those are "hard wired" into the provider.