ASP.NET provides a number of ways to maintain user state, the most powerful of which is session state. This article takes an in-depth look at designing and deploying high-performance, scalable, secure session solutions, and presents best practices for both existing and new ASP.NET session state features straight from the ASP.NET feature team. Mike Volodarsky

ASP.NET 2.0 introduces a Web Part control that is designed to deal with the serialization, storage, and retrieval of customization and personalization data behind the scenes. In this article, the authors explain how you can put the WebPart control to work in your ASP.NET 2.0 applications. Ted Pattison and Fritz Onion

The current version of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) satisfies many current and future manageability requirements. In this article Michael Jurek demonstrates how WMI provides important system management capabilities and develops a WMI-aware monitoring solution you can use to instrument your ASP.NET applications. He then introduces the capabilities of MOM 2005 that allow you to monitor these instrumented applications. Michael Jurek

SQL Server 2005 offers a completely redesigned SQL Server Integration Services engine, formerly known as Data Transformation Services. It includes many new features such as built-in support for Fuzzy Lookups and Fuzzy Groupings, which help you build powerful data-cleansing solutions. This article provides an overview of fuzzy searching techniques and a dissection of the underlying fuzzy search technology implemented in SQL Server 2005. Jay Nathan

With the .NET Framework and GDI+, you can easily add elements of style to your applications. You can use transparency, irregularly shaped windows, notification icons, toast pop-ups, different color schemes, and lots more. Designed well, these techniques can create much more compelling interactions between your application and your users. This article explains how. Bill Wagner