Long ago I concluded that in tools, ease of use was tools that were reliable, did fairly simple things, and were easy to understand how to use and not tools tha

Long ago I concluded that in tools, ease of use was tools that were reliable, did fairly simple things, and were easy to understand how to use and not tools that tried to do a lot, do favors, anticipate what I wanted, and do more for (to!) me! So, in a kitchen, I don't want a hot dog cooker and, instead, can, depending on what I want, just use a pot and with water and boil the hotdogs, use a skillet with some oil and fry the hot dogs, or go on the back porch, build a charcoal fire, and broil the hotdogs. Besides, for a hotdog cooker, how to clean the darned thing! And have to get it out of storage, set it up, etc. No thanks. For cutting onions, use my best three tools in a kitchen, a good French chef's knife, a cutting board, and my hands. Works great also for potatoes, carrots, cabbage, garlic, and much more. In a shop, have saws, hammers, files, wrenches, screwdrivers, a drill plate, drill bits, a nice, variables speed, reversible 3/8" electric (not battery powered -- don't want to mud wrestle with batteries that run down, need charging, go dead, wear out, get weak, need to be replaced, etc.) drill. Also socket wrenches, etc. But lots of automatic tools, e.g., a screwdriver that has a spiral shaft that push on to turn a screw, don't want. To sharpen a kitchen knife? Sure, just use whatever grit size sand paper, usually silicon carbide, want, put the paper flat on the cutting board, and sharpen away. Simple tools, that do simple things, and are reliable and easy to understand. Then, build more on those. So, just use TCP/IP raw sockets and build more on those. For a session state server, use TCP/IP raw sockets, de/serialization, and two collection classes. Piece of cake, no use of CONFIG whatever, no use of XML, only a few pages of documentation, lots of good, old code samples, rock solidly reliable ("TCP/IP sockets are the workhorse of all of the Web and Internet") etc. By far the easy way.