Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

7.5. Session State

There comes a point in the life of most applications when they begin to have more sophisticated storage requirements. An application might need to store and access complex information such as custom data objects, which can't be easily persisted to a cookie or sent through a query string. Or the application might have stringent security requirements that prevent it from storing information about a client in view state or in a custom cookie. In these situations, you can use ASP.NET's built-in session state facility.

Session state management is one of ASP.NET's premiere features. It allows you to store any type of data in memory on the server. The information is protected, because it is never transmitted to the client, and it's ...