Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

34.1. The Issue of State

At the beginning of the Chapter 32, I pointed out that HTTP on the Web results in a stateless wire protocol. This very fact makes web development extremely different from the process of building an executable assembly. For example, when you are building a Windows Forms application, you can rest assured that any member variables defined in the Form-derived class will typically exist in memory until the user explicitly shuts down the executable:

public partial class MainWindow : Form
{
  // State data!
  private string userFavoriteCar = "Yugo";
}

In the World Wide Web environment, however, you are not afforded the same luxurious assumption. To prove the point, create a new Empty Web Site project named SimpleStateExample and ...