Forms authentication failed for the request. Reason: The ticket supplied was invalid.

When was the last time you saw this message ??? (just kidding)

If you drill down to the EventViewer logs you"ll probably see this code

Event code: 4005 Event message: Forms authentication failed for the request. Reason: The ticket supplied was invalid.

Now most people think that this is due to the machine keys in the machine.config file but actually this is due the expiration of a valid ticket which was for a short duration.

After the expiration, the users would need to again sign-on and this makes the user experience even worse. To fix this issue, you need to increase the validity of the ticket by using the sample below

FormsAuthenticationTicket authTicket = new FormsAuthenticationTicket(1, "usercookie", DateTime.Now, DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(120), false);

Difference between Thread and ThreadStart delegate

I have been working since .Net 1.1, the way we create/spawn threads is

1. Create a ThreadStart delegate for parameter less target method or Create a ParameterizedThreadStart delegate for target accepting parameters. 2. The next step was to create a Thread object and pass this delegate. 3. Lastly call the Start method to execute the thread.

This was the norm till .Net 2.0. What seems confusing now is that, from ver. 2.0 we can directly pass the target to the Thread's constructor and call the Start method !!!

Well this is due to the enhancement which .Net 2.0 onwards have to offer. Instead of going the way we did above in 1.1, the compiler now invokes the appropriate delegate based on the target passed.

So technically speaking both the approaches below are the same.

1. ThreadStart ts = new ThreadStart(Somework); // .Net 1.1 way of creating threads Thread t = new Thread(ts); t.Start();

2. Thread t = new Thread(Somework); // .Net 2.0 onwards way of creating threads t.Start();

Happy coding :)