<membership defaultProvider=“EcommerceMembershipProvider“>
<providers>
<add name=“MyMembershipProvider“ type=“MyMembershipProvider“ connectionStringName=“myConnectionString“ membershipTable=“Customer“ username=“EmailAddress“ password=“Password“ setAdditionalCookies=“True“ cookieList=“EmailAddress, CustomerID, ShipState“ selectFields=“EmailAddress, Password, CustomerID, ShipState“/>
</providers>
</membership> 

As you can see I am setting 3 cookies, EmailAddress, CustomerID, and ShipState.  So far so good.  

I also needed a feature in the admin of the site so the site administrator could easily log as differnt users by click a special link in the admin – here’s where I started getting very weird behavior. 

The auto login page I link to loads, calls my membership provider, logs the user in, sets the cookies and redirects to the page I want.  This works great on FF, not so much on IE 7.  I noticed that I always had 2 sets of cookies, one for the administrator that was logged in (admins use the same membership provider but have a different role assigned to them) and one for the user that I tried to auto login as. 

But this only happens in IE 7?

It was always my understanding that setting a value of a cookie that already exists overwrites the value that was currently there, not creates a second duplicate.  And this was only happening in IE 7.

Here is my code for setting the cookies from my membership provider:

HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies(cookieName.Trim).Value = dr.Item(cookieName.Trim).ToString
HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies(cookieName.Trim).Expires = DateAdd(DateInterval.Month, 1, Date.Now)

Seems like it should work to me?  I search everywhere, just Google actually, and couldn’t find anyone having a similar problem.  I came across the Cookies Overview page at MS and it occured to me that maybe the cookie path for these sets of cookies differs for some reason.

So I added the following to my cookie setting code:
HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies(cookieName.Trim).Path = “/store”

Problem solved!  Not exactly sure why, but hey IE 7 now works.

If anyone has any insight as to why this might happen please let me know.

It came out pretty slick, some pretty funky CSS stuff going on here along with some nice PNG transparencies. Man I cannot wait until IE 6 is gone for good – who knows how long that will but I can dream at least.

I will probably mostly be posting about other posts I have found interesting and decided to integrate into my programming. Since I am the only programmer at my office this will hopefully give me a place to vent and get some creative feedback.

Anyways here goes!