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

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.