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Asked: 2026-05-23T21:16:12+00:00

HttpSessionState appears to be a typical key -> value collection, so why does it

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HttpSessionState appears to be a typical key -> value collection, so why does it not implement the IDictionary-Interface?

Background: I am trying to output/save the Context of my ASP.NET Website when an error occurs and wanted to do this with a recursive function, that outputs a Collection and all containing Collections. Because HttpSessionState only implements ICollection and IEnumerable, I am losing the information about the keys if I want to do it in a generic manner (= working with interfaces).

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  1. Editorial Team

    IDictionary implies that the target collection is capable of quick lookups by key. (As far as I am aware) HttpSessionState is just a list of items, not a dictionary style structure. As a search of that structure would take linear time there’s no reason to treat it as a dictionary. If you need a lot of quick lookups then copy the keys and values into a true dictionary. If you don’t need quick lookups, then you’ll just need to specialize for that class.

    There are more things to an interface than just a list of method prototypes. There are semantics that need to be preserved for an interface too. Quick lookups by key is one such non-explicit assumption for (most) consumers of any IDictionary.

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