State Management with ASP.NET
This article assumes some background knowledge of ASP.NET's application lifecycle events, and the Global.asax, Global.asax.vb and Web.Config files.
Basic Concepts
State management refers to storing or using information received from the client to alter the behavior of an application. This can be as simple as remembering a user's name or as complex as managing caches of data from a database to share among multiple sessions.
For example, the following line of code stores the current time (obtained from another application) in the application collection with the following line of code:
Application("AppStart") = Date.Now.ToLongTimeString
Name-value pairs may be added directly to the application collection in this manner. These values are global to all instances of the application. This is an example of application state management.