Why are there two incompatible session state types in ASP.NET?

Question

I see two means of working with session data in ASP.NET MVC:

• System.Web.SessionState.HttpSessionState, available on HttpApplication

Answer 1

In ASP.NET MVC abstractions over the classic HttpContext objects Request, Response, Session were introduced. They represent abstract classes and are exposed all over the MVC framework to hide the underlying context and simplify the unit testing because abstract classes can be mocked.

For example for the session object you have HttpSessionStateBase and its implementation HttpSessionStateWrapper.

Here's an example of how to convert between the classic ASP.NET session and the abstraction:

HttpSessionStateBase session = new HttpSessionStateWrapper(HttpContext.Current.Session);

So the System.Web.SessionState.HttpSessionState which you are referring to is the underlying session object which existed ever since classic ASP.NET 1.0. In MVC this object is wrapped into a HttpSessionStateWrapper. But since ASP.NET MVC is an ASP.NET application you still get the Global.asax in which you have the bare session.