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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T17:41:06+00:00

We’re supporting legacy code that is dropping a cookie and setting the expiration to

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We’re supporting legacy code that is dropping a cookie and setting the expiration to DateTime.MaxValue:

HttpCookie cookie = new HttpCookie(cookieName, value);
cookie.Expires = DateTime.MaxValue;

It seems that on some browsers (which we are not logging), this cookie expires immediately–or may not even be getting dropped. According to MSDN, DateTime.MaxValue is December 31, 9999. Are there any browser-related issues with setting a cookie expiration to this date?

The correct answer would be to change the expiration date, but at this point, we can’t change production code.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If I had to randomly guess why it’s not working, I would say it has something to do with Unix epoch time. This value will technically overflow (on 32-bit machines) after January 19, 2038 at 3:14:07 AM GMT – so the next second after this would be interpreted as January 1, 1970 0:00:01 AM GMT.

    It’s possible that the future time you’ve supplied is actually converted into a past time.

    Again, this is a complete guess and hopefully I can test it soon when VWD Express 2008 is downloaded on my home machine.

    Edit:

    Searching for this issue, I have found a similar error:

    http://framework.zend.com/issues/browse/ZF-5690

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