Hello,
I am trying to create forum pages (like these here at VBForums.com) in ASP.Net. It is more of a learning project so I can get into ASP.Net. I want to make them as efficient as possible, so here are some questions I need to have answered:

1. Should I have just one database connection for the app, and share it among all the pages, or should I just build a connection on each page load?

2. How should I keep people logged in while browsing the forum? I have started by using cookies on the users computer, but that still means that I would have to verify the cookie against the database every time a page loads that requires the user to be logged in (reply or new post). Would a session object be better to use? How would using it to store the information affect server performance?

Thanks a bunch for any help provided. Also, Lethal, if you read this, did you take any of those exams yet for .Net?