[AccessD] OT: Preserving state of user interaction in ASP.NET applications

Hi All,

I have watched MSDN webcast (http://www.microsoft.com/usa/webcasts)
yesterday : ASP.NET: Building Data Driven Web Applications Using ASP.NET and
ADO.NET...

Looks interesting and as usual with MS presentations - "life is easy and
cheese is free" - making ASP.NET applications is very similar now to
designing MS Access (projects) forms. But  what they showed was a rather
simple sample application with sometimes ugly interface and with very
frequent round-trips to the server. And it was completely stateless i.e.
every front-end interaction used to create(reuse pooled?) connection on
server side, recreate dataadapter object, datasets etc...

The question is: Does anybody here investigated the subj in all the details?
What is wanted is to have the state of the user->Server interactions
preserved between server calls - there are third party tools - e.g.
WebObjects from ComponentOne, which look like serving this purpose  but I
expected that all that can be done without extra efforts and by using
build-in ASP.NET features - was I wrong?

TIA for any info,
Shamil