Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 3.5

The Session's State

The HttpSessionState class provides a dictionary-based model of storing and retrieving session-state values. Unlike HttpApplicationState, this class doesn't expose its contents to all users operating on the virtual directory at a given time. Only the requests that originate in the context of the same session—that is, generated across multiple page requests made by the same user—can access the session state. The session state can be stored and published in a variety of ways, including in a Web farm or Web garden scenario. By default, though, the session state is held within the ASP.NET worker process.

Compared to Session, the intrinsic object of ASP, the ASP.NET session state is nearly identical in use, but it's significantly ...