State management is the process by which you maintain state and page information over multiple requests for the same or different pages.

Like any HTTP-based technology, Web Forms pages are stateless, which means that they do not automatically indicate whether the requests in a sequence are all from the same client or even whether a single browser instance is still actively viewing a page or site.

Furthermore, Web pages are disposed of and recreated with each round trip to the server; therefore page information will not exist beyond the life cycle of a single page. For more information on server round trips and the Web Forms page life cycle, see Web Forms Page Processing.

ASP.NET provides multiple ways to maintain state between server round trips. Choosing among the options for state management available in ASP.NET will depend heavily upon your application, and it should be based on the following criteria:

• How much information do you need to store?
• Does the client accept persistent or in-memory cookies?
• Do you want to store the information on the client or server?
• Is the information sensitive?
• What sorts of performance criteria do you have for your application?

ASP.NET supports various client-side and server-side options for state management.

Client-side options are:

• The ViewState property
• Hidden fields
• Cookies
• Query strings

Server-side options are:

• Application state
• Session state
• Database