Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

7.1. The Problem of State

In a traditional Windows program, users interact with a continuously running application. A portion of memory on the desktop computer is allocated to store the current set of working information.

In a web application, the story is quite a bit different. A professional ASP.NET site might look like a continuously running application, but that's really just a clever illusion. In a typical web request, the client connects to the web server and requests a page. When the page is delivered, the connection is severed, and the web server abandons any information it has about the client. By the time the user receives a page, the web page code has already stopped running, and there's no information left in the web server's memory. ...