Authentication problems after publishing MVC 4 app to azure

Question

I have a basic ASP.NET MVC 4 site which I am hosting on Azure websites. The authentication is forms authentication and has not been customised from the default template. Eve

Answer 1

After trying dozens of different suggestions from various blog posts, I have found a solution. Adding the InitialiseSimpleMembership attribute to my home controller resolves the problem.

[InitializeSimpleMembership]
public class HomeController : Controller

After making this change, I managed several successful publishes without issues. I suspect the reason is that the following line of code in the InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute constructor needs to run before any calls to User.IsInRole are made:

WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection("DefaultConnection", "UserProfile", "UserId", "UserName", autoCreateTables: true);

I guess the best thing to do would be to run InitializeSimpleMembership in Application_Start.