Best way to handle AuthenticateRequest?

[rh]

I've been reading a lot of articles about how to handle roles based security in ASP.NET and I've seen two popular methods of handling AuthenticateRequest and I'm curious which is preferred. (I've omitted most error checking to simplify the code).

Option 1 (from MSDN patterns & practices - extract cookie and decrypt):
---
string cookieName = FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName;
HttpCookie authCookie = Context.Request.Cookies[cookieName];
if (authCookie == null)
return;
FormsAuthenticationTicket authTicket = null;
authTicket = FormsAuthentication.Decrypt(authCookie.Value);
string[] roles = authTicket.UserData.Split(new char[]{'|'});
FormsIdentity id = new FormsIdentity( authTicket );
GenericPrincipal principal = new GenericPrincipal(id, roles);
Context.User = principal;
---

Option 2 (various articles - cast identity, get forms ticket):
---
FormsIdentity id = (FormsIdentity)HttpContext.Current.User.Identity;
FormsAuthenticationTicket ticket = id.Ticket;
string userData = ticket.UserData;
string[] roles = userData.Split(',');
HttpContext.Current.User = new GenericPrincipal(id, roles);