Chris May

Just curious, but why do you avoid the Session?

It seems like there is almost always a better place to put stuff than in session.

I encrypt data in the querystring to pass data between pages that I don't want the user to mess with.

A lot of my apps run on a cluster, which is pretty good, but there is always a chance that the user will hit the wrong server, and b/c we are not using state server, their session will be empty.

It also seems like a good way to run into problems, 2 programmers can overwrite each others values in session, if you are looking for a "OrderID" in session, and 2 developers are both using that name for different things in their sections of the application...

For our site, session expires a lot faster than their authentication ticket, so if you are in the middle of working on something that is expecting a value in sesssion, and session has expired, then you are SOL.

Session also dies if your asp.net process recycles.

Some of these problems are fixed if you use a state server... but alas we don't (yet).

I'm a huge fan of simple, clean URLs, so I'm generally against stashing stuff there if I can avoid it.

One of the first things I did when I started the current project (my first ASP project of any kind) was to build a clone of Ruby on Rails' Flash, which is a fantastic little idea: it allows me to stash stuff in the Session specifically and only for the next Request, so if a POST comes in, I stash the results in the Flash, then redirect to another page. On that redirected GET I can then access all that stuff. This is currently the only thing I'm using the Session for, but it's reason enough for me.

Thats interesting. I wasn't aware of that.

Thanks for posting.