Storing classes in Application State (ASP.NET)

Let's say I wish to store an instance of the following in Application State, to be accessed very often.

public class Example {
  publ开发者_StackOverflow社区ic string A;
  public string B;
  public bool C;
  public int D;
  // ...
}

I can't decide whether to store the whole class together as Application["Example"], or to store its properties individually as Application["ExampleA"] etc.

My thinking is that ((Example)Application["Example"]).A might have to copy the whole class into memory just to access one property - is that right? Or am I mistaken?

I would use a static global variable, slightly better performance, type safe and will make your code easier to read. For more info see...

ASP.NET Application state vs a Static object

you are right but....

you don't need to copy the whole object if you just need the value of one of its property. Conceptually if we are talking about a value object(you don't need an identity or a particular object) you can store just the property. If you need to know what is the value of the property for one particular object(imaging a user's password) you should store the whole object.

The application state is stored in memory anyway so I can't see a significant overhead with retrieving the class. I'm fairly sure, although could be wrong, that the classes wouldn't be serialised/deserialised with each request.