ASP.NET : Session VS Static Property - A Fanny Story

As I was a beginner, I faced many technical hurdles and made mistakes that nowadays seem to be silly, but now I understand that they are part of my journey. Without this courage, I would not have gotten here.

When I had my first experience with ASP.NET, it was in 2007, and the version was 1.1.

With no senior guidance, but googling and searching, I dove into the .NET world and started to create a commercial project from scratch.

Now, I say thanks to my 22-year-old self for all his efforts and resilience.

And one mistake I will share here.

Users and login were a key part of this project, and keeping the user logged in was fundamental.

I was coming from PHP, and I already knew about sessions, and that's exactly how I used to keep the ID of the user logged in.

But when I started out with C#, I realized that it has static properties. In the first moment, what I just thought was “Why don't I keep the user ID in a static property?” It is easter than Session.

And for a beginner in ASP.NET, sessions seemed to be more difficult than PHP.

So I took this decision, and kept the user logged in a static class.

At first glance, it seemed to be working well. I was just testing on my local machine, logging and dislogging, and it worked perfectly.

However, when I published the site, and the users came to use it for the first time, a scary thing happened.

The second user overwrote the first, and the first user was logged as if it were the second.

Right away, I realized that it could be due to keeping the user in a static class, and I went straight to the point, and replaced the static class with sessions, and then it resolved.

So, I learned the hard way that there is a difference between using Session and Static Class

What happens is that an ASP.NET Web Forms application is one instance running on the server, and all requests access the same instance running. And as a consequence, all static items are shared for all the requesters.

On the other hand, sessions are kept separately for each requester, but shared between tabs.

Here is the session definition by ChatGPT:

Session refers to a server-side storage of information that is used to maintain a user's state and data across multiple requests within a web application. It begins when a user accesses the site and ends when they leave, log out, or after a period of inactivity. Sessions are typically identified by a unique session ID stored in a browser cookie or URL.

And here is an example of how to set and get a session value:

Nowadays, one way for handling user login is the bearer token, which will be a topic for one of my next posts.

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Have a blissful day!