Devart Forums

OK, I am going to document this in a few places because the answer to my specific problem wasn’t anywhere to be found.

Longform:
The overt problem: The user logon code provided by Microsoft, Membership.ValidateUser stopped working after working for a number of months. The supporting code for this method was also “canned” and was largely plagiarized from Microsoft’s website, up to and including the remarks.

Collateral problems: I was heavily multitasking at the time, and changes had been made to numerous parts of the project, which clouded the symptoms of this problem.

Cause: I was creating a Development and Test version of the project and changed the web.config settings to point to the Development database. However, changing web.config back to production did not fix the problem. It did fix the intermediate problem with connections to the web services. Which was, of course a serious part of the problem. Deleting and restoring the entire solution from a known working backup did not fix the log on problem.

Final Solution: Edited copy of web.config at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\YOURWEBPROJECTNAME\web.config,
I don’t know where the settings are that System.Web.Security.Membership points to the published location, vice the projects development location on G: Drive, or why publishing once caused the change, but republishing didn’t rewrite web.config.

Shortform:
Having problems with Membership.ValidateUser? Check the settings to ALL your web.config files, even ones you don't know you have.