ASP.NET site auto-login during development

Question

While developing an ASP.NET site, is the a way to setup automatic login?

For example, each time I build the site and run it, I have to login again. I don't want to disable security entirely, but I would like to automate the process of logging in while I'm working on the site.

Do you have Quick Test pro? That could do this. – Raghav May 11 '11 at 15:30 — Raghav, May 11 '11 at 15:30
Please mark question as answered. – Shimmy Weitzhandler May 16 '11 at 07:41 — Shimmy Weitzhandler, May 16 '11 at 07:41

Darin Dimitrov · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-11T15:46:05.247

4

Just keep your browser open and Ctrl+F5 after you modify and/or recompile in Visual Studio. This will keep the authentication cookie.

Another possibility is to setup an automatic login page in which you would test whether you are in Debug mode and force a Login by using FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage("someusername", false);. Then you could instruct Visual Studio to always run the web site at this url:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    #if DEBUG
    FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage("someusername", false);
    #endif
}

Ideally this page should be excluded from the build process and never shipped.

As pointed out in the comments section by @Mufasa if your site uses Session you might need to use out of process mode (StateServer or SqlServer) instead of InProc because when you recompile the application domain will be reloaded and everything stored in memory lost.

edited May 11 '11 at 15:46

answered May 11 '11 at 15:33

Darin Dimitrov

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Additionally, if your site depends on session information in addition to cookie authentication, you may need to switch to an external state service like StateServer or SQLServer mode, so that the session info persists during application restarts. – Jon Adams May 11 '11 at 15:44
@ Mufasa, yes, that's good point about the session. Thanks. I will update my answer to take it into account. – Darin Dimitrov May 11 '11 at 15:45
2

You can check -- if(System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached) -- to determine if you're in Debug mode, or set a variable somewhere if this isn't sufficient. – Jemes May 11 '11 at 16:05
I also tend to leave the browser window open in the background, and just rebuild the project, then refresh the page. That way you can test it in other browsers at the same time as well. You only need to go back through the login process if you want to debug the code from within VS. – Ira Rainey May 12 '11 at 07:48

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:51

Use Windows Integrated Authentication for your debugging, and Forms Authentication for your production code?

If this is an option, you could have multiple web.config files for your different environments - see question How do you handle multiple web.config files for multiple environments?.

We are also looking into having multiple web.configs for our different environments. One idea we have (that we haven't looked into in detail) it to use T4 code generation (part of Visual Studio) to generate the web.config as part of the build process.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 11 '11 at 15:42

This may or may not work given how intricate your security requirements are, but you could potentially have an alternate login page that uses integrated (NTLM or Kerberos) authentication and have your windows credentials flow through to the site automatically.

ASP.NET site auto-login during development

3 Answers3

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