SharePoint Unsecured Application Page

This post has been migrated, original date 18 Aug 2009 According to MSDN the class Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase, Microsoft.SharePoint should be used to give anonymous users access to page. However despite in inheriting from the class you might still get a 401 Unauthorised error. Not only do you need to inherit from this class but you also need to override the AllowAnnoymouseAccess property and set it to return true:

public class Login: Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase{
	 protected override bool AllowAnnonymouseAccess{
	 	 get{
	 	 	 return true;
	 	 }
	 }

}

I am not sure why this class needs this additional property but once added it worked fine.