Building e-Commerce Sites with the .NET Framework

State Management in ASP.NET

Before we get into the details of building a shopping cart, I first want to explain the role of state management in ASP.NET sites. It is important to understand the options that are available for state management before you create your shopping cart. This will allow you to determine how the order and other information can and should be stored. State management has two forms in ASP.NET: application state and session state. In the following sections, I'll explain the powerful options that ASP.NET gives Web developers to manage state. Although application and session state have been greatly improved, they are similar to the features that ASP developers use today. Then I'll detail how state management was implemented in ...