Question

In the SignOut method of System.Web.Security.FormsAuthentication, the ASP.NET team chose to expire the FormsAuth cookie by setting the expiration date to ‘Oct 12 1999’.

HttpCookie cookie = new HttpCookie(FormsCookieName, str); cookie.HttpOnly = true; cookie.Path = _FormsCookiePath; cookie.Expires = new DateTime(0x7cf, 10, 12); 

What’s the significance of October 12th, 1999? Is it an inside joke, or is there some valid reason to set your cookie expiration to that particular date?

Edit: The theories below are interesting, but they are just guesses. Since Phil, Scott, and other members of the ASP.NET team are on StackOverflow, I thought it would be fun to offer a bounty. Hopefully someone can track down the original developer and get an authoritative answer.

Awarded: To Scott Hanselman for escalating this one all the way to ScottGu. I was really hoping for some sort of super-secret, Illuminati-esque meaning, but looks like it was just the old ‘one year ago’ trick.

Answer 1

Ok, folks, I talked to a dozen different people on the ASP.NET Team. The dev who wrote THAT line of code, we think, is gone. We asked The Gu, and he wasn’t sure.

Stefan Schackow, from the team, said, after speaking with Manu Vasandani:

‘The ASP.NET developers were being chased by a pack of feral ninjas on fire and thus were under intense pressure to complete the feature whilst fearing for their lives. As a result in the heat of the moment(ary passion) the snap decision was made to set the constant to the current point in time, less one year. Unfortunately the developer who made that decision wasn’t fast enough checking it in, and despite the shortcut ended up dying an agonizing death at the hands of the ninja leader ‘Eviscerati Extremus Minus One’.’

Translation? The date is one year before the date that line of code was written.