What is View State?

In classic ASP, when a form is submitted the form values are cleared. This happens as the site does not maintain any state (ViewState).
In ASP .NET, when the form is submitted the form reappears in the browser with all form values. This is because ASP .NET maintains your ViewState. ViewState is a state management technique built in ASP.NET. Its purpose is to keep the state of controls during subsequent postbacks by the same user. The ViewState indicates the status of the page when submitted to the server. The status is defined through a hidden field placed on each page with a <form id="Form2" runat="server"> control.


If you want to NOT maintain the ViewState, include the directive
<%@ Page EnableViewState="false"%> at the top of an .aspx page If you do not want to maintain Viewstate for any control add the attribute EnableViewState="false" to any control.



Item stored in ViewState exist for the life of the current page. This includes postbacks (to the same page).
In some cases, however, you can set View State property to False and reduce the number of bytes sent along the wire.
A good candidate for this arrangement are password fields, which should be cleared any time the form is sent back to the client.
Another case where you MAY want to set this property to False is when you are building a
databound DataGrid.