I've been learning about the MembershipProvider class and I thought that the Membership.ValidateUser() method was supposed to be used to to log a user in.
However, I just learned that there is a FormsAuthentication.Authenticate().
What is the purpose of ValidateUser() within Membership?
In short, there are times when you might want to simply validate that a user is who they say they are without needing to persist an authentication cookie for any length of time.