http://monstersgotmy.net/post/QueryString-Candy-Could-Rot-Your-Teeth.aspx

I wrote this to be a basic interpreter for the query string that it’d be easy for anyone to grab the code. Yes I could have used extension methods but that would’ve narrowed down the availability of the code but I think I’ll add an update to include it also today. The only issue is it will still require the same amount of methods since .Convert() by itself won’t work unless I do some sort of type analysis on the data which would be problematic if people put a string instead of a number in the address bar it would still end up raising an exception when it tries to assign a string to a int variable.

If I was writing an application and I had the requirement of being able to deal with changing the backing stores of a page what I’d most likely do is write up a bunch of wrappers for ViewState/Session/Cache as Unity LifeTimeManagers then I can change my backing stores with just a few line changes.

This sounds like a good post about Unity especially with trying to figure out the best way to wrap the ViewState to be a LifeTimeManager. I have a few ideas I’ll have to play around with.

1.) I don’t like using ViewState, it is hard to scale an application when it is dependent on ViewState. Look into storing values in Session, that way if you decide to go to memcached, NCache, or any other distributed cache you can without any impact on your code.

2.) I think you could reduce the conversion to one generic method called Convert

3.) You are using .Net 3.5 right?! Why not write an extension method that hangs right off of the Request.QueryString object. Just extend and overload the index operator, or add the convert method to the querystring.

Request.QueryString[key];
Request.QueryString["key"].Convert();

that would be pretty sweet and convenient.