Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to maintain state in your ASP.NET applications. In the first section, you learned how to create, modify, and delete browser cookies. You learned how you can take advantage of cookies when you need to add a small amount of data to a browser. You also learned how to preserve precious cookie space by creating multi-valued cookies.

Next, we examined the topic of Session state. You learned how to take advantage of Session state to store larger amounts of data than can be stored in a cookie. You also learned how to configure cookieless Session state so that Session state works even when a browser has cookies disabled. We also discussed how to make Session state more robust by storing Session state data in a Windows NT Service or a Microsoft SQL Server database table.

Finally, you learned how to use the Profile object to create a typed and persistent form of Session state. You learned how to enable anonymous profiles. In the final section of this chapter, we built a custom Profile provider that enables you to store Profile properties in separate database table columns.