I continue to learn more and more about developing websites with additional features. I’ve chosen ASP.NET as my preferred language for building web applications for most of my larger corporate clients. A component I use frequently with this dynamic sites are Session Items in ASP.NET.
As I build more sites I start using more and more Session.Item(“ItemName”) identifiers in my code to pass parameters from page to page and data control to data control. There comes a point where you start not remembering exactly how you named something or even what Session Items you’ve stored in the first place.
I’d think it would be a helpful feature to be able to add the Session Items you’ve set and used in a website into a control panel like a snippet of code. I’d imagine it functioning similarly to how the Manage Styles panel displays the CSS styles that are available. Instead of the styles being listed each Session Item identifier would be listed.
Another nice feature to add to that would be a panel that would display the set values you’ve captured already in your code when testing or running the site in debug mode. What I’ve usually done to accomplish this is to place a hidden label for each Session Item that displays the set value if it exists. Sometimes I’ll make the font color on these labels white so they don’t show up to the site visitor, but if I drag my mouse over the area and the text and background colors reverse I can see the values clearly. If I’m not worried about the visitor seeing the values I’ll setup a CSS style that displays the label in a small font and very light gray or blue color.