One of the most common questions in developing ASP.NET applications on Windows Azure is how to manage session state. The intention of this article is to discuss several options to manage session state for ASP.NET applications in Windows Azure.

What is session state?

Session state is usually used to store and retrieve values for a user across ASP.NET pages in a web application. There are four available modes to store session values in ASP.NET:

1. In-Proc, which stores session state in the individual web server’s memory. This is the default option if a particular mode is not explicitly specified.
2. State Server, which stores session state in another process, called ASP.NET state service.
3. SQL Server, which stores session state in a SQL Server database
4. Custom, which lets you choose a custom storage provider.

You can get more information about ASP.NET session state here.

In-Proc session mode does not work in Windows Azure

The In-Proc option, which uses an individual web server’s memory, does not work well in Windows Azure. This may be applicable for those of you who host your application in a multi-instance web-farm environment; Windows Azure load balancer uses round-robin allocation across multi-instances.

For example: you have three instances (A, B, and C) of a Web Role. The first time a page is requested, the load balancer will allocate instance A to handle your request. However, there’s no guarantee that instance A will always handle subsequent requests. Similarly,the value that you set in instance A’s memory can’t be accessed by other instances.

The following picture illustrates how session state works in multi-instances behind the load balancer.

Figure 1 – WAPTK BuildingASP.NETApps.pptx Slide 10

The other options

1.     Table Storage

Table Storage Provider is a subset of the Windows Azure ASP.NET Providers written by the Windows Azure team. The Table Storage Session Provider is,in fact, a custom provider that is compiled into a class library (.dll file), enabling developers to store session state inside Windows Azure Table Storage.

The way it actually works is to store each session as a record in Table Storage. Each record will have an expired column that describe the expired time of each session if there’s no interaction from the user.

The advantage of Table Storage Session Provider is its relatively low cost: $0.14 per GB per month for storage capacity and $0.01 per 10,000 storage transactions. Nonetheless, according to my own experience, one of the notable disadvantages of Table Storage Session Provider is that it may not perform as fast as the other options discussed below.

The following code snippet should be applied in web.config when using Table Storage Session Provider.

<sessionState mode="Custom" customProvider="TableStorageSessionStateProvider">   <providers>     <clear/>    <add name="TableStorageSessionStateProvider"         type="Microsoft.Samples.ServiceHosting.AspProviders.TableStorageSessionStateProvider" />   </providers>
</sessionState>

You can get more detail on using Table Storage Session Provider step-by-step here.

2.     SQL Azure

As SQL Azure is essentially a subset of SQL Server, SQL Azure can also be used as storage for session state. With just a few modifications, SQL Azure Session Provider can be derived from SQL Server Session Provider.

You will need to apply the following code snippet in web.config when using SQL Azure Session Provider:

<sessionState mode="SQLServer"
sqlConnectionString="Server=tcp:[serverName].database.windows.net;Database=myDataBase;User ID=[LoginForDb]@[serverName];Password=[password];Trusted_Connection=False;Encrypt=True;"
cookieless="false" timeout="20" allowCustomSqlDatabase="true"
/>

For the detail on how to use SQL Azure Session Provider, you can either:

• Follow the walkthrough from this post.
• Or use ASP.NET Universal Providers via Nuget.

The advantage of using SQL Azure as session provider is that it’s cost effective, especially when you have an existing SQL Azure database. Although it performs better than Table Storage Session Provider in most cases, it requires you to clean the expired session manually by calling the DeleteExpiredSessions stored procedure. Another drawback of using SQL Azure as session provider is that Microsoft does not provide any official support for this.

3.     Windows Azure Caching

Windows Azure Caching is probably the most preferable option available today. It provides a high-performance, in-memory, distributed caching service. The Windows Azure session state provider is an out-of-process storage mechanism for ASP.NET applications. As we all know, accessing RAM is very much faster than accessing disk, so Windows Azure Caching obviously provides the highest performance access of all the available options.

Windows Azure Caching also comes with a .NET API that enables developers to easily interact with the Caching Service. You should apply the following code snippet in web.config when using Cache Session Provider:

<sessionState mode="Custom" customProvider="AzureCacheSessionStoreProvider">   <providers>     <add name="AzureCacheSessionStoreProvider"           type="Microsoft.Web.DistributedCache.DistributedCacheSessionStateStoreProvider, Microsoft.Web.DistributedCache"           cacheName="default" useBlobMode="true" dataCacheClientName="default" />   </providers>
</sessionState>

A step-by-step tutorial for using Caching Service as session provider can be found here.

Other than providing high performance access, another advantage about Windows Azure Caching is that it’s officially supported by Microsoft. Despite its advantages, the charge of Windows Azure Caching is relatively high, starting from $45 per month for 128 MB, all the way up to $325 per month for 4 GB.

Conclusion

I haven’t discussed all the available options for managing session state in Windows Azure, but the three I have discussed are the most popular options out there, and the ones that most people are considering using.

Windows Azure Caching remains the recommended option, despite its cons but developers and architects shouldn’t be afraid to decide on a different option, if it’s more suitable for them in a given scenario.