Understanding application state in ASP.NET

Unlike traditional desktop applications, ASP.NET applications handle many independent HTTP requests. To keep track of information between requests, ASP.NET provides several state management options.

The most commonly used objects you can use are:

Application
Session
ViewState

The Application object stores information shared by all users of the web application. The Session object stores information specific to an individual user (using cookies).

For example:

Application["Visitors"]
Session["UserName"]

The ViewState preserves control values between requests for a single web page.

Choosing the appropriate state management mechanism helps improve both application scalability and maintainability.