Session

The Session Object is one of the easiest to use and most useful aspects of ASP.NET. There are some caveats to its use when building very large systems and Web Farms, so it pays to be educated.

How To

• Basics of ASP.NET Session State - Start here with this excellent MSDN Documentation
• Using Session and Application Objects in ASP.NET
• Selecting the Method for Maintaining and Storing ASP.NET Session State
• Taming the Stateless Beast: Managing Session State Across Servers on a Web Farm
• ASP.NET Session State FAQ - From Peter Bromberg: "Below is a quick summary of the different modes of session state, followed by a list of FAQ's, compiled from several sources, including my own "discoveries"
• How to use ASP.NET session state SQL Server Mode in a failover cluster - "This article describes the information that you must have to configure a Web server cluster to use the SQL session state that runs in a failover cluster."

Whitepapers/Blogs

• State Management  - good blogged overview of the decision-making process, advantages and disadvantages of storing state in various places.
• State Management and ASP.NET - A good basic white paper enumerating your various options for state management.
  KB: ASP.NET State Management Overview - A dry but fairly thorough KB article on session state.
• Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Providers: Introduction and Session State Providers - "Session state providers provide the interface between Microsoft ASP.NET's session state module and session state data sources." The MSDN documentation is a good place to start if you plan on writing your own, or if you just want to understand one of the existing providers.
• This is a short section in MSDN that offers insight into a couple of a obscure details that might be of interest.
• Fast, Scalable, And Secure Session State Management For Your Web Applications - An excellent article from MSDN magazine on the ASP.NET session state architecture.
• Architectural And Performance Considerations - A very thoughtful blog post that can help you decide which session provider to use.

Enjoy!

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