Question

Is it better practice to use class variables, or the session cache in ASP.NET? I have a variable which I need to persist across page loads. Is it better to use:

public class MyClass {   private SomeObject anObject;   private method1() {     anObject = new SomeObject();   }   private method2() {     // do something with anObject   } } 

or

public class MyClass {   private method1() {     Session['anObject'] = new SomeObject();   }   private method2() {     SomeObject anObject = (SomeObject)Session['anObject'];   } } 

Answer 1

Use cache. I’m not working on .NET, but in Java with servlets. There I would definitely use HTTP session, since my application can run in a cluster of servers and I know that storing a value in HTTP session will work in this setup, while storing it in class variable might be a bit problematic. You can store the whole class MyClass in HTTP session and then you can have values stored in class variables.

Basically, you can view HTTP sessions like a hashtable.