What is View State

The view state is a key element of an ASP.NET page because it is the primary means to persist the state of the Web server controls. Whenever the page posts back, the state is restored, updated using the current form parameters, then used to run the postback event handler. Normally, the view state is a hashed string encoded as Base64 and stored in a hidden field called __VIEWSTATE. In this way, the view state is not cached on the client, but simply transported back and forth with potential issues both for security and performance. As I said, you could keep the view state on the server, which requires only minimal coding. You will pay extra overhead because you're accessing a file off the disk or a database, but you'll be returning much slimmer pages while taking less of a security risk. Although in this column I considered persistent storage on the server (file or database), nothing would really prevent you from using the Cache object, thus combining server-side storage and speed of execution