A users session on an ASP.NET site by default will time-out after 20 minutes. This however can be changed through either the web.config file or IIS.

To edit through the web.config file you need to edit the sessionState tag under system.web

Or through IIS click on your site name and then click Session State under the ASP.NET heading. There will be a field labeled Time-out (in minutes).

The value you enter for time-out must be an integer.

Help it doesn't seem to work!

If your sessions still seem like there timing out after 20 minutes it could be because your site isn't very active.

The application pool for your site also has an idle time-out that is set by default to 20 minutes. When the idle time-out is reached it will cause your application pool to recycle and therefore loose any active sessions (that's assuming you have the session state mode set to In Proc). Therefore it is a good idea to increase this to whatever you have set the session time-out to.

To do this go to your sites application pool in IIS, click advanced settings on the right and then look for the Idle Time-out (minutes) setting and update this to be the same as your session time-out value.

In ASP.NET 2 Microsoft introduced the Membership provider. By many accounts it is not perfect, but as a one size fits all solution it's not bad. Plus it had a major advantage that a lot of other people would also be using it, so if you wanted to grab a forum solution to stick on your site, chances were it would use the same Membership provider.

Now though there is a second Membership provider from Microsoft called SimpleMembership. It simplifies a lot of things that weren't needed with the original Membership provider and also introduces support for working with OAuth providers. Not only that but if you create the MVC 4 project from the default template that is what your solution will be set up to use.

The problem however is Membership and SimpleMembership are not compatible. They store their information in separate tables and if you do try to copy all the users from one to the other, you will soon discover the hashing algorithm used on the password is different. You probably also had all your passwords one way hashed so you can't even generate the new ones.

There is a solution however. Paul Brown has written a nice bit of code to update the MVC 4 account controller so that when your users log in they will first be authorised against SimpleMembership, if that fails it will then authorise against the original Membership and if that succeeds it will generate the new password in SimpleMembership using the one just provided by the user.

Over time as your users log in the will be slowly migrated over. The second time the log in the SimpleMembership will authorise them and the extra code won't even be hit.

http://pretzelsteelersfan.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/migrating-legacy-apps-to-new.html

If you're like me you may have gone into design mode in visual studio 2010 hoping to do some work only to be greeted with the following message.

Which initially is a bit confusing, as your site may have just run without any problems. But even so you go to check the placeholders anyway and they look fine. Then you copy and paste the ID's out of the Master Page just to be sure, but still no luck. Check through the Master Page itself and that also looks fine, no squiggly lines to be seen. Finally create a new WebForm linked to the master page, but even this gives the same error.

Now if you have the problem I had, look at the title tag in the Master Page. Does it say <title /> or <title></title>? If it's the first then that's your issue. By default VS2010 will put in the correct tag, but if like me you've just slapped in some HTML from an old project or from a PSD conversion that's been done for you, then chances are you may end up overwriting the title tag as well.