ASP.NET State Management

ASP.NET State Management

Introduction to the Post Series
ASP.NET state management is one of the most important mechanisms in the 
arsenal of web application developers.
Even though, State management is sometimes underestimated.
When I tutor about ASP.NET I always talk a lot about how to implement
state management. A lot of performance issues or page life cycle issues
are caused by a poorly implemented state management.
One thing to remember, the web environment is stateless. Maintaining state
for users or controls is a must. The way to do it has many faces and in the following
posts I'm going to write about the subject.

What is State Management?
The web as maintained earlier is stateless. Every web application needs to
track its users who visit them. There are a lot of reasons to do this.
For example, in my blog I use FeedBurner to get statistics about pages that
my users visit or from where did they come to my blog. The statistics help me to
understand the things that my users like or dislike.
The FeedBurner application uses the state management mechanism to track the
things that my users are doing in my blog for reporting purpose.

ASP.NET State Mangement Types
ASP.NET provides two types of state management - client and server.
Every type has its techniques to handle state.
The client side techniques are ViewState, control state, hidden fields,
cookies and query string. 
The server side techniques are application state and session state.

What is Coming Next
In the next post I'll explain the client side state management in more details.
Meanwhile, good luck to Maccabi Tel Aviv in the European basketball final four.