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

Do recall, however, that certain behaviors expected by most ASP.NET web forms developers will not work without ViewState. The purpose of ViewState is to provide the illusion that various page and control properties persist from one request to the next. ViewState does not contain all control properties, just those that have changed. The idea is that ViewState retains these properties as they were at the time the form last rendered.

One good example is a SelectedIndexChanged event on a dropdown (one that does not have autopostback set). This works because ViewState retains the previous index, and the form posts the current index, and the control compares the two in order to know that the selected index has changed. That's when it raises the SelectedIndexChanged event. Without ViewState, that event will not fire. Same for TextChanged events, etc.

Absent the GET situation (which I have never run into), the big problem with ViewState is using it where it's not needed. Your grid control does not need to retain the previous values of all controls in all its rows, so don't enable ViewState on it.