How to work with session state in ASP.Net Core

ASP.Net Core is an open source, cross-platform, lean, extensible and modular framework for building high-performance web applications. Session state in ASP.Net Core enables you to store user data and persist the data across requests from the same client. You can take advantage of the necessary middleware (available as part of the (Microsoft.AspNetCore.Session package) to work with session state in ASP.Net Core.

Middleware components in ASP.Net Core are used to customize the handling of requests and responses, and inspect, route, or modify the request and response messages that flow through the pipeline. Usually, you have a chain of middleware components in the application pipeline in ASP.Net Core. This article presents a discussion on how we can work with session state in ASP.Net Core.

Create an ASP.Net Core MVC project

First off, let’s create an ASP.Net Core project in Visual Studio. Assuming Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio 2019 is installed in your system, follow the steps outlined below to create a new ASP.Net Core project in Visual Studio.

1. Launch the Visual Studio IDE.
2. Click on “Create new project.”
3. In the “Create new project” window, select “ASP.Net Core Web Application” from the list of templates displayed.
4. Click Next.
5. In the “Configure your new project” window shown next, specify the name and location for the new project.
6. Click Create.
7. In the “Create New ASP.Net Core Web Application” shown next, select .Net Core as the runtime and ASP.Net Core 2.2 (or later) from the drop-down list at the top.
8. Select “Web Application (Model-View-Controller)” as the project template to create a new ASP.NET Core application.
9. Ensure that the check boxes “Enable Docker Support” and “Configure for HTTPS” are unchecked as we won’t be using those features here.
10. Ensure that Authentication is set to “No Authentication” as we won’t be using authentication either.
11. Click Create.