ASP.Net's introduction of the web.config file went a long way to filling the configuration hole we had to deal with in classic ASP. We actually went from having very little (global.asa was the closest thing) to a well-structured, change on the fly XML file. For the most part, the web.config file does the trick fine. However there are some limitations and constraints with using it, which you are probably already aware of. What you might not know is how easy is it to surmount those issues by creating a far more flexible alternative.

Most browsers support cookies of up to 4096 bytes. Because of this small limit, cookies are best used to store small amounts of data, or better yet, an identifier such as a user ID. The user ID can then be used to identify the user and read user information from a database or other data store.
Browsers also impose limitations on how many cookies your site can store on the user's computer. Most browsers allow only 20 cookies per site; if you try to store more, the oldest cookies are discarded. Some browsers also put an absolute limit, usually 300, on the number of cookies they will accept from all sites combined.
A cookie limitation that you might encounter is that users can set their browser to refuse cookies. If you define a P3P privacy policy and place it in the root of your Web site, more browsers will accept cookies from your site. However, you might have to avoid cookies altogether and use a different mechanism to store user-specific information.
Although cookies can be very useful in your application, the application should not depend on being able to store cookies. Do not use cookies to support critical features. If your application must rely on cookies, you can test to see whether the browser will accept cookies. There are code snippets you can do to check if your client browser has cookies enabled or not. I will explain later about this throughout the article.

ASP.NET 2.0 Tutorials: Application development in .NET : Client Side Application Development Client applications are applications that run on the client system-or the desktop of the user. They are closest to the traditional windows based applications and they display forms or windows on the desktop enabling the user perform predefined tasks. Word processors and spread sheets are examples of client applications that employ menus, GUI elements and access local resources such as printers and scanners.

In the beginning – that is, in C# 1.0 – the methods belonging to a class were defined within the body of the class. C# 2.0 changed that somewhat. By introducing partial classes, the methods making up a class could be defined in more than one place. However, they were all collected together at compile time, so it was nothing particularly new. Anonymous methods were something new, however. Conceptually, anonymous methods are associated with no class at all. C# 3.0 continues the journey with extension methods.

Demonstrates how to use custom validation on a form by checking to see if a string in a TextBox is not the same with a string from an array (or database), case in which it displays 'This name is already taken'.