State Management

Summary

State management is the art of retaining information between requests. Usually, this information is user-specific (such as a list of items in a shopping cart, a user name, or an access level), but sometimes it’s global to the whole application (such as usage statistics that track site activity). Because ASP.NET uses a disconnected architecture, you need to explicitly store and retrieve state information with each individual request. The approach you choose for storing this data can have a dramatic effect on the performance, scalability, and security of your application. To perfect your state management solution, you’ll almost certainly want to consider adding caching into the mix, as described in Chapter 11.