How to remove or compress your asp.net viewstate

Question

Just spent a lot of time exorcising asp.net's large (but understandably useful) viewstate from an app, and i think it's worth sharing how it's done.

Basically, i want this question to be open to all solutions for shrinking/compressing/removing viewstate.

Answer 1

First easy option, use the built-in SessionPageStatePersister class. What this does is keep the viewstate on the session on the server, rather than sending it to the client. However, it still sends a smaller viewstate down so isn't all roses:

using System.Web.UI;
... the following goes in your Page class (eg your .aspx.cs) ...
PageStatePersister pageStatePersister;
protected override PageStatePersister PageStatePersister
{
  get
  {
    // Unlike as exemplified in the MSDN docs, we cannot simply return a new PageStatePersister
    // every call to this property, as it causes problems
    return pageStatePersister ?? (pageStatePersister = new SessionPageStatePersister(this));
  }
}

This method shrunk a particularly large postback from 100k to 80k. Not great, but a good start.

Answer 2

Switch to ASP.NET MVC! No ViewState!