ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Using Session State

You can’t use a cookie to store a shopping cart. A cookie is just too small and too simple. To enable you to work around the limitations of cookies, ASP.NET Framework supports a feature called Session state.

Like cookies, items stored in Session state are scoped to a particular user. You can use Session state to store user preferences or other user-specific data across multiple page requests.

Unlike cookies, Session state has no size limitations. If you had a compelling need, you could store gigabytes of data in Session state. Furthermore, unlike cookies, Session state can represent more complex objects than simple strings of text. You can store any object in Session state. For example, you can store a DataSet or a custom ...