asp.net-membership

Membership.ValidateUser always returns false after upgrade to VS 2010 / .NET 4.0

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Not sure whether this pertains to VS 2010 or to the upgraded framework, but… we are using the Oracle membership provider to authenticate users. Prior to the upgrade everything worked fine, but now Membership.ValidateUser(user, password) returns false despite valid credentials. There is no exception thrown, so it’s hard to determine what the problem might be. The website administration tool in VS 2010 is still able to manage users and roles (more or less), so I have no reason to question connectivity. What might the problem be?

Normalization of Strings With String.ToUpperInvariant()

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I am currently storing normalized versions of strings in my SQL Server database in lower case. For example, in my Users table, I have a UserName and a LoweredUserName field. Depending on the context, I either use T-SQL’s LOWER() function or C#’s String.ToLower() method to generate the lower case version of the user name to fill the LoweredUserName field. According to Microsoft’s guidelines and Visual Studio’s code analysis rule CA1308, I should be using C#’s String.ToUpperInvariant() instead of ToLower(). According to Microsoft, this is both a performance and globalization issue: converting to upper case is safe, while converting to lower case can cause a loss of information (for example, the Turkish ‘I’ problem).