CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio-2010debugging
learningtech
learningtech

Reputation: 33705

asp.net - maintain session while debugging and rebuilding solution?

I'm writing an asp.net Web Application. I wrote a login page that authenticates a user and stores their UserID in the Session["UserID"]. Every page in the web application will check for a valid Session["UserID"]. If not valid, then redirect the user to the login screen.

This works great, but it's slowing down my ability to debug every page on my website. Each time I make a change to a *.cs file, I need to press F6 to rebuild my solution. Doing this destroys my session, which means I need to go back to the login screen, type my username and password, click to the page I was working on, do my tests, make code changes to my code, and repeat.

Is there a way to keep my session alive everytime I re-build my solution so I don't have to go to the login page every single time?

Upvotes: 7

Views: 2814

Answers (2)

Blindy
Blindy

Reputation: 67386

The reason why you lose your session is because your application is restarted when you write to the application folder. In fact the same thing happens when you publish your application, every user currently logged in will lose their session.

This is intentional because they have no way of knowing that the DLL's you were using in your page are still there or not. So instead they monitor the folders themselves and trigger a restart when you write to them.

There is no workaround for this. It's in fact a feature that saves you time (most of the time), imagine tracking down memory corruption errors because the pointers moved around in your code!

Upvotes: 2

Sean H
Sean H

Reputation: 746

Unfortunately, I don't know that you will find any way around this limitation. Every time you build your project, you are going to trigger a restart of the web application. Even if you were to use a persistent store for keeping sessions, you're going to lose the session cookie being set in your browser.

You could add a "remember me" feature to your app. You'd need to do a little reimplementation, in order to keep the information about the current user authentication in a data store that is less volatile than ASP.NET session state. Also, you'd store the index to that information in a cookie that is more persistent than a session cookie.

That's the best I can think of, or at least it's the best I can think of without some significant extensions to the .NET security providers. However, take it with a grain of salt -- I've never tried to solve this particular problem before, and I hardly consider myself an expert in all things ASP.NET session-related.

Upvotes: 3

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