Turning Off ViewState

ASP.Net's ViewState functionality is an absolutely fantastic feature but is highly overused by many new web developers. The problem with it of course is that the more items that are stored, the more data is returned upon postback. Page sizes getting inflated and often for no particular good reason.

Most of my apps have [at least] these two common pages:

• About
• View Error Log

The latter is an Admin-only page that allows me to periodically examine what errors, if any, have been occurring.

In both cases, the pages are very static - ie. display the data and that's it. So there's absolutely no need for any ViewState functionality. Yet on both I observed quite a bit. I don't know precisely where it was all coming from but I didn't want it there. At first I started adding EnableViewState="false" to various ASP.Net controls but then I learned that the quickest and most effective way would be to just add it to the very first line in the markup code, as follows:

<%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/main.master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="about.aspx.cs" Inherits="about" EnableViewState="false" %>


In my research I learned of a cool tool for deciphering ViewState data into something more meaningful. It's written by ASP.Net guru, Fritz Onion, and you can download it here.