>No guru, but Just say no to session period.. :)
>
>You will save yourself a ton of head aches. If you never plan on having but a a few users (1-10) and you have a big box
>then maybe. Otherwise stay away from it.
>

In my experience, Session has not been a ton of head aches. Our business object is exposed via 4-15 pages and we have a requirement that it is saved in a single transaction. We persist a dataset in session (inproc) and have never had any issues. We typically average 60 concurrent users. We DO have a big box with a lot of RAM. :-)

That said, in the setting Matt describes, I would make the round trips to SQL Server. It is plenty fast.


>
>>Ok all you gurus... I've got a question about using Session variables to store a few Business Objects once I've pulled in their Entity data from the back-end.
>>
>>I use my Master Page to maintain several things that I want to be available for each page that is based on it, and I find it tempting to maintain those BO objects in Session variables so they will be easily available between page requests, right? I can just cast them back to their respective BO types, and I'm ready to go, without hitting the database again.
>>
>>For instance, every page to which a user might navigate in my app use a Customer BO, an Invoice BO, a User BO, and a CurrentLineItem BO. (Each of these is a wwLinqToSql Business Object Wrapper BO from the West Wind Web Toolkit.)
>>
>>So, is it cool to save each of those objects into Session variables once I get them all populated so I can easily re-create them on page re-generation.
>>
>>An alternative would be to just store the Integer PK for each of those BO's in Session variables, and use that Integer key to re-fetch each BO, but that seems like a lot of unnecessary hits back to the database.
>>
>>I don't have any understanding of the memory or bandwidth impact of storing a few Objects in session variables every time I send out a page to the user.
>>
>>You have the entire Business Object, you have the Entity, and you have the Integer PK. Lots of possibilities, so I'm not sure which way to go.