Introducing Microsoft® ASP.NET AJAX

Chapter 6. Built-in Application Services

In this chapter:
Forms Authentication Services	210
User Profiling Services	222
Conclusion	231

The HTTP protocol is simple, effective, and ubiquitous, but it is not stateful. So two consecutive and logically related calls to the same URL (that is, a postback) are treated as independent calls, and for each of them a new and especially clean environment is created. To add some state and global data containment to Web applications, virtually all server-side runtime environments build an abstraction layer and provide additional services to applications. Common services for ASP.NET applications include session state, authentication, role management, caching, profiling and, in general, any operation that can manipulate ...