Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C#

Chapter 10. State Management

Before we begin discussing state management in ASP.NET, let's get one thing straight: Attempting to manage state in Web applications goes against the fundamental design principles of the Web. One of the primary goals of the Web and its underlying protocol, HTTP, is to provide a scalable medium for sharing information. Adding user state inherently reduces scalability because the pages shown to a particular user will be different from those shown to another user and thus cannot be reused or cached.

In spite of this fact, many applications deployed on the Web require user-specific state to function properly. Applications ranging from e-commerce shopping sites to local company intranet sites depend on the ability to track ...