Did something change with how HttpContext.Items and MVC cont

I upgraded a 6.3 site that has a few MVC widgets that use HttpContext to communicate with each other and then display data.  This works fine in my 6.3 site, but when I upgraded it to 7.0 these widgets no longer render any content.

 Through debugging I found out that at some point HttpContext.Items is empty.

Here is how I have it setup:

I have a manager widget where I assign what category I want to pull images from.  This manager should then create the collection and store it in HttpContext so that another widget can pull from it.

Here are the actions:

I am not going to post all the model code, but at the end of that InitializeModel() it checks this:

Now I used the VS debugger and confirmed at this point that there is indeed a collection being found and it does create the HttpContext.Items["Tombstones"] object

 Now on the same page I have a second widget that will check for that object and then call out to its view to render the collection of images.

In my 6.3 site I can see in VS that HttpContext.Items has roughly 83 items and HttpContext.Items["Tombstones"] has the collection of images I want.  The 7.0 site shows that HttpContext.Items has a count of "0" so nothing ever renders.

 My manager view does not render anything and is only to setup the HttpContext.  My images view looks something like this.

I think I might have a solution that works.  If I use SystemManager.CurrentHttpContext which is Sitefinity's wrapper to store the information it seems to be a happy camper.