The Effects of ViewState

by Eric Lee

The ASP.NET framework provides the ViewState mechanism to automatically maintain application state by carrying data forward and backward between browser requests. In this video we see how some ASP.NET controls such as the DropDownList and TextBox maintain state based on postback form values rather than ViewState, allowing the smart developer to disable unnecessary ViewState. Using Visual Studio Team System we can see how this dramatically reduces the size of request and response data, and improves the performance and scalability of the application.

▶ Watch video (10 minutes)