ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Using Browser Cookies

Cookies were introduced into the world with the first version of the Netscape browser. The developers at Netscape invented cookies to solve a problem that plagued the Internet at the time. There was no way to make money because there was no way to create a shopping cart.

Here’s how cookies work. When a web server creates a cookie, an additional HTTP header is sent to the browser when a page is served to the browser. The HTTP header looks like this:

Set-Cookie: message=Hello

This Set-Cookie header causes the browser to create a cookie named message that has the value Hello.

After a cookie has been created on a browser, whenever the browser requests a page from the same application in the future, the browser sends a header ...