How do I turn off viewstate for good?

Question

Coming from a PHP background I love using clean URLs to grab data from one service to another.

However, on some of my ASP.NET projects I get the horrible ViewState p

Answer 1

I had a similar question when writing the Reputation Tracker.

I don't know how you do it globally other than to just never use a form with runat="server" set, which is more to do with discipline than a setting. In particular, if you have runat="server" set on a form I believe you'll always get a viewstate parameter, even if you've turned it off everywhere so you don't get any values. That was my experience, anyway.

Obviously this limits you somewhat, but I've found that using the HTML server controls (instead of the ASP.NET controls) for appropriate parts of ASP.NET can make life a lot simpler to understand.