Question

I am just curious to findout how the System.Web.Security.FormsAuthentication class is been implemented. I therefore opened C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework.NETFramework\v4.0\System.Web.dll in Reflector but this class methods are not showing any code. This class is not derived from any another class and its a sealed class. If I see empty code like following in the reflector, what does this mean? How the login and logout functionlaity actually work in this case.

public static void SetAuthCookie(string userName, bool createPersistentCookie)
{
}

public static void SignOut()
{
}

Answer 1

Reference Assemblies only contain metadata, not real code (mostly used by Visual Studio for when referencing assemblies).

Using Reflector, you need to do File | Open Global Assembly Cache and get System.Web from there, after having unloaded the other System.Web from Reference Assemblies.