ASP.NET Roles cookie expiration date easter egg?

Just stumbled upon this today while spelunking the code for ASP.NET Membership & Roles.  The DeleteCookie() method on the Roles provider API does a standard call to remove the cookie, but afterwards writes out a new, expired cookie just to make sure.

While perusing with Reflector, I noticed something odd thing about the expired cookie it writes out. The expiration date is set to 10/12/1999 rather than the expected DateTime.MinValue.   So, I'm just curious about the significance of that date.  A quick Live.com or Google search doesnt seem to reveal anything interesting.

Maybe the coder was in trouble with the wife about forgetting their anniversary, so he immortalized it in code - who knows.. :)

2 Comments

  • I've always made it a habit to plant at least one innocent egg in most all of my projects. I remember when I first started finding them in Windows95 many years back. I wonder what type of stuff we'll see in Vista.

  • DateTime.MinValue would create an in-memory (Session) cookie. The developer set it to an explicit date in the past so it would really expire on the client machine, instead of being kept in memory until the browser is closed

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