Membership in POP Forums revisited again

Last week I posed the question on whether or not I should write my own Membership provider for use in POP Forums. As I mentioned in that post, I already have my People class that does so much of what Membership does, but it might be convenient for users including the forum in their app to use the familiar (well, it'll be familiar someday!) Membership class instead of my own.

Now that I've spent some time with it, creating my own provider would be a piece of cake because I'd only need to override the various methods of MembershipProvider and have them make calls to my classes. It would in fact be ridiculously easy!

Using the Profile class looks like it's a little more complicated, and of course is dependent on web.config to map properties. The SDK docs are missing a lot of stuff, so I'm not sure where to go next on this. Is it possible to programmatically set properties for the profile object on app startup instead of having to do it from web.config? Would it make more sense to hard-code properties into a derived Profile provider?

This is all pretty exciting stuff. It's neat to be doing new things in .NET and it seems like it will be forever before we get bits we can use in production!