Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 3.5

Customizing Session State Management

Since its beginning, the ASP.NET session state was devised to be an easy-to-customize and extensible feature. For various reasons, in ASP.NET 1.x it came out with a high degree of customization but a total lack of extensibility. In ASP.NET 2.0, the session state subsystem was refactored to allow developers to replace most of the functionalities—a characteristic that is often referred to as session state pluggability. In ASP.NET 3.5, you find the same set of capabilities as in the previous version.

All things considered, you have the following three options to customize session state management:

• You can stay with the default session state module but write a custom state provider to change the storage medium (for ...