Question

What is the best way to provide strongly typed access to the session object? I am planning on turning on Option Strict, which is causing the compiler to complain about my lazy programming technique of directly accessing the session object:

Dim blah As Integer = Session("Blah")

My initial thought is to create a class that wraps the session and provides strongly typed properties for the information stored in the session. However, I cannot decide if the class should be a singleton, or instantiated on every use, or where the code should reside (i.e. within the web project or within a class library).

I’m leaning towards a singleton in my class library, but I don’t know if that is the best solution, or if I am missing any other possibilities.

Proposed Solution:

Public Class SessionAccess
    Public Shared Property Blah(ByVal session As HttpSessionState) As Integer
        Get
            Return Convert.ToInt32(session("Blah"))
        End Get
        Set(ByVal value As Integer)
            session("Blah") = value
        End Set
    End Property
End Class

Code Behind:

Dim blah As Integer = SessionAccess.Blah(session)

Answer 1

Either my proposal is the “standard” way to do it, or else no one wraps their session access, since this question hasn’t received very many answers.

I did find one line in this answer that mentioned creating a SessionManager:

• Wrap the ASP.NET Session with a
  SessionManager to avoid development
  mistakes in spelling, etc. when
  referencing items from Session.

I have not thought of any reason to not use a singleton class to provide typed access to the session, so that is the solution I went with in the project.