Safe to remove all OWIN packages from MVC5 project with Simple Membership?

Question

I'd like to clean up the project I'm working on. We are using Simple Membership and have no intention of supporting authentication using Twitter, Google, etc. I don't know that much about OWIN but I see quite a few NuGet packages installed by default.

Is it safe to uninstall all of the OWIN packages?

Answer 1

You can safely delete all Owin packages and you don't have add owin:AutomaticAppStartup key with false value.

Just make sure you delete all owin dlls from your bin folders after removing owin packages. They are not cleaned from your bin folder by Visual Studio and somehow they get executed automatically. See my answer in this question:

c# - OWIN Startup Class Missing - Stack Overflow

Answer 2

I also just had to do this. One of our team had created the MVC 5 website, which included all the OWIN stuff. We're using Membership and so after doing a little digging into the differences (and honestly looking like it would NOT be easy), I just decided to dive head first. Here's what I did:

1. Deleted Startup.cs (this will give an error that's fixed by the next step)
2. Add the following key & value to appSettings in your config: <add key="owin:AutomaticAppStartup" value="false"/>