Session maintenance in cloud application ASP.Net MVC - asp.net

Question

I am developing a web application on ASP.Net MVC 4 with razor syntax. I have to deploy it on cloud, probably on Azure.
I am quiet confused about the login scheme of MVC. We have to work on multiple schemas so thats why we aren't using the membership provided by ASP.Net.
I know session maintenance and i used it in web forms but session have some serious issues with cloud.
What would be the best method to save usernames and session data?

Answer 1

I would avoid using the Session State to store user information or even session data, because this makes your application less scalable.
If you want to store a username, displayname, email address, ... I would suggest Claims Based authentication. Brock Allen wrote a great introduction article to get you started: Replacing forms authentication with WIF’s session authentication module (SAM) to enable claims aware identity.
The main idea is that you hand out a cookie (just like with Forms Authentication):
Claim[] claims = LoadClaimsForUser(username);
var id = new ClaimsIdentity(claims, "Forms");
var cp = new ClaimsPrincipal(id);
var token = new SessionSecurityToken(cp);
var sam = FederatedAuthentication.SessionAuthenticationModule;
sam.WriteSessionTokenToCookie(token);
And this cookie represents a ClaimIdentity which can contain one or more claims like email address etc...
private Claim[] LoadClaimsForUser(string username) {
var claims = new Claim[]
{
new Claim(ClaimTypes.Name, username),
new Claim(ClaimTypes.Email, "username#company.com"),
new Claim(ClaimTypes.Role, "RoleA"),
new Claim(ClaimTypes.Role, "RoleB"),
new Claim(OfficeLocationClaimType, "5W-A1"),
};
return claims; }
In terms of session data you might want to consider Windows Azure In-Role Caching or the Windows Azure Caching Service. There's even a Session State Provider which can store the session state in cache: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg185668.aspx.
But you can easily do this yourself without using the session state by playing with the cache keys, like this:
myCache.Put(user.Id + "_Friends", friendsList);