Hi,

I am doing Forms Based Authentication using the built in tools of .NET.
Authenticating off a database with some code a wrote and using login.aspx,
web.config, etc etc... the usual deal..
I have it all working fine and pages I want to protect show a login page
before being logged in to.

The problem lies that I have a few clients that want to have a tiny login
form on an area of their homepage. So basically we are talking about a login
form on a non protected page that submits to a protected page. A lot of
sites do this as I am sure you know.

Now, because of VIEWSTATE and the fact that forms need to post to themselves
I cant just put appropriate form code on the homepage posting to some
protected page. (LIKE YOU COULD EASILY DO IN A CLASSIC ASP SCENARIO)

I turning off VIEWSTATE isn;t really an option.

So, what is the solution... is there no way to do something like this using
the built in forms authentication structure of .NET.

Any ideas or articles someone can point me to would be most appretiated. I
have searched for weeks before asking this here. I just can't come up with a
good solution other there writing something totally custom just to handle
this scenario that doesn't use the built in Forms Authentication Fetaures
but checks the user credentials, sets the authentication ticket.. all via
basic inline code..etc etc

Is that my only solution ? Is this something Microsoft left out of the forms
authentication scenarios ? Seems like it is something a lot of people want
to do.

Thanks