Recently I found a problem in one of application we developed. Here my colleague use a Static SqlConnection object through a class in his code. He did that to save his effort of writing and Connection everytime. Everything works great during our development and online reviewing. However as soon as we lauch website in beta mode, it start creating problem which seems bit random in occurance and hence were hard to track. During this time I get involve in the project development and I was not very big fan on Static object and start to think against that code, which looks good to me at first. However for some reason I miss the basic of C# and ASP.NET and hence it took a while to recognize the problem was indeed the static code. So for those who did same mistake here is explanation of why Static object didn’t work in ASP.NET for connection.

When ASP.NET application is first called the complete code is loaded in Memory, specially the pages in App_Code folder and they act as part of web server and not as standard PHP site where they run and loaded on each request. Hence, once this happens all static object become static in memory for each and every request your server will get. This is indeed good way to share information between all User and all request, if that help your case. But in most general case you never want to share information between user in this dynamic method, which is not permanent. Anyways, for connection it really doesn’t make a difference if you share the object as you anyways want to open connection and close it as soon as you are done. In most case you have 1 simple insert or fetch query to run. And in a website with several users at a time it hardly make a difference as Sqlconnection are open and close in jiffy and took less than 1 second in most cases. For a shopping cart which has 100 -200 order per month this case will work just fine.

However, since connection is shared, there is every possible chance that if you fire a SQL query for say Reader, it get shared with some user on some other session and this is what you don’t want. It happens to our project when we have Bulk CSV upload which usually take 30-50 seconds, but if someone during this time fires and open other page of website they start to get random Database related errors. From SqlReader is close to field “Xyz” is not available, as they tend to share the connection with other requests.

Hope you avoid those problem. The colleague who did this in our project is not working with us anymore, but hey, where ever you are , please don’t punish us like this again !!!