Wrap Your Name Value Variables

ASP.NET gives a developer a lot of loosely typed key-value collections in which to stash stash variables, depending upon persistence needs. The short list includes ViewState, Session, Application and HttpContext.Items. These collections can come in very handy when one needs to keep an object around outside of a single request or shuttle things between different bits of the http pipeline. But it comes at a price—these collections are loosely typed, just returning Objects. Moreover, there is no compile-time checking to ensure that you are requesting the right key in the right place. Errors can lead to crashes at best, and interesting data corruption at worst. Here is a handy technique to avoid such issues.