Moving From Casini to IIS, Login Fails. How come?

ASP.NET 2.0 Membership

A very common question that comes up while using ASP.NET 2.0 Membership is that when moving a web application from the local developer environment with Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005) to IIS is that login no longer works. Almost everytime this happens, it comes down to the application name in the Membership Profile of Web.Config is set to / instead of the actual application name. That is, if you you were to look at your web.config, this is what you would see.

  133  <roleManager enabled=“true“/>
  134     <membership>
  135       <providers>
  136         <remove name=“AspNetSqlMembershipProvider“/>
  137         <add name=“AspNetSqlMembershipProvider“
  138              type=“…“
  139              connectionStringName=“LocalSqlServer“
  140              enablePasswordRetrieval=“false“
  141              enablePasswordReset=“true“
  142              requiresQuestionAndAnswer=“true“
  143              applicationName=“/“
  144              requiresUniqueEmail=“false“
  145              minRequiredPasswordLength=“1“
  146              minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters=“0“
  147              passwordFormat=“Hashed“
  148              maxInvalidPasswordAttempts=“5“
  149              passwordAttemptWindow=“10“ p=“”
  150              asswordStrengthRegularExpression=“”/>
  151       </providers>
  152     </membership>

Notice that the applicationName is set to just a "/". To make the application work with IIS, you really need to set that to the name of your application. That is, the correct way to specify applicationName is something more like this:

  133 <roleManager enabled=“true“/>
  134     <membership>
  135       <providers>
  136         <remove name=“AspNetSqlMembershipProvider“/>
  137         <add name=“AspNetSqlMembershipProvider“
  138              type=“…“
  139              connectionStringName=“LocalSqlServer“
  140              enablePasswordRetrieval=“false“
  141              enablePasswordReset=“true“
  142              requiresQuestionAndAnswer=“true“
  143              applicationName=“/MyCoolApp1“
  144              requiresUniqueEmail=“false“
  145              minRequiredPasswordLength=“1“
  146              minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters=“0“
  147              passwordFormat=“Hashed“
  148              maxInvalidPasswordAttempts=“5“
  149              passwordAttemptWindow=“10“ p=“”
  150              asswordStrengthRegularExpression=“”/>
  151       </providers>
  152     </membership>