ASP.NET Forms Authentication Disappearing Cookie

I have been developing the login for a secure asp.net web application.
The application requires Forms Authentication with a pass through to a Windows Identity (see How To: Use Protocol Transition and Constrained Delegation in ASP.NET 2.0). To simplify matters I have been building up the security process in an empty web project.
having created a Forms Authentication web site (How To: Use Forms Authentication with Active Directory in ASP.NET 2.0) and implemented the Use Protocol Transition and Constrained Delegation (see link above) the login worked on the Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET Development Server.

Next step was to release to a development server, the same Windows 2008 machine used to host the main application, following deployment the login failed.
Having searched a little I broke out Fiddler and discovered the Authentication Ticket/Cookie was set on login and then lost on redirect to the target secure page.

After a good nights sleep and fiddling around a little I verified the whole login process worked by placing the ticket on the URI, this however was not an acceptable solution.
Back to searching, this time I included IIS7 in my search and came up with this - I couldn't quite believe this was true, but it fixed my problem.

The test site I had created included an underscore in the URL, this was causing the cookie loss.

I have run this past a few colleagues and despite the use of an underscore in a URL not been common they knew of no real reason not to use one.

I hope this help someone out there.

Micorsoft remix 08 (Brighton)

A quick run-though of the Seminars I attended with some useful links and breif background.

Keynote
Bill Buxton & Scott Guthrie

Bill Buxton gave a short talk on the importance of Design, why its important, what it can do for a business and who is good at it. Not just about having good designers, its about using them and using them at the right time (throughout the entire product lifecycle).

Scott Guthrie spoke on a number of subjects, Rich Internet Applications, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight 2 and some other related subjects.

Introduction To Silverlight 2 - Parts 1 & 2

Scott Guthrie

Scott Guthrie went through a two part Silverlight overview.

ADO.NET Data Services for the Web (a.k.a. Project Astoria)
Mike Flasko

Astoria / ADO.NET Data Services read all about it... more posts to follow

Visual Studio Tips and Tricks
Sara Ford

21 tips and tricks from Sara's Blog, (her remix post). Many tips and tricks can be found here, look out for Incremental Search, Box Selection, disable the copy/cut action when on a blank line, Snippets, Trace Points and Macros... and more.

Look out for the Tip of the Gadget (for Vista users).

Understanding the ASP.NET Model View Controller
Scott Guthrie

Scott Guthrie gave an overview of MVC, examples are availiable on his blog.

MVC is an alternative to and not a replacement for Web Forms.

I'll let you read it about MVC, very interesting...

ASP.NET Front End Performance
Chris Hay

Check out Chris' Blog for details, and I will be posting another entry just on this seminar.

Instant Messenging - Your route to millions
Dr Neil Roodyn

Not quite what I expected, but there may be someone interested out there.

The Windows Live Messenger Library can be used to add Messenger functionailty to your site, there are sufficient examples and detail on line, I wont bore you with any more details.

Design wIth Microsoft Expression
Arturo Toledo
An overview of what can be done with some of the Microsoft Expression family, mainly demos and examples. Presentation slides done with Deep-Zoom and examples/assets used should be on the web. In Arturo's Blog there is an entry with the slides from remix.

20/20 Talks
Many people...
20 slides, 20 seconds a slide, a challenge for many people, featuring: "20 tips, 20 seconds a tip" (Sara Ford ), the Silverlight 2 "20 Sliders, 20 seconds a slider"

PhotoSynth

(not a seminar)

A little display in the conference, will be looking into this a little more, loads of fun with digital photos.

LINQ - Language Integrated Query language

(used in examples)

LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML - quick and efficinet data access, again more posts relating to this will appear soon.