ViewState best practice 1 - wrap access to 'weak variable'

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ViewState best practice 1 - wrap access to 'weak variable'

I've been working on ASP.NET project lately. What I found is not-pefect-usage of weakly typed constructs such as ViewState, Session, Cache etc.

For me it's obvious that code that contains something like this: this.ViewState["Age"] repeated many times is not-perfect. I believe, it is natural to wrap access to the ViewState into private property thath is strongly typed and is much cleaner to use in your code. What I advise is the snippet shown below:

private int? Age
{
    get { return this.ViewState["Age"]; }
    set { this.ViewState["Age"] = value; }
}

It allows you to access the ViewState 'variable' in strongly-typed way. It will also work even if there is no 'variable' set yet - thanks to 'int?' (Nullable int).
The same snippet works with Session, Cache, etc.

Conclusion:

Do not be afraid of private properties and methods. Introduce them not only to reuse the code but also to make it pretier.