Fluent.Interface

There have been considerable improvements in the way ViewState is serialized with ASP.NET 2, and with the added ControlState functionality it is possible for third party controls to behave themselves with ViewState disabled.

There are some great articles written on understanding ViewState like this one by Scott Mitchell.  My practical example (attached) list some ways to minimizing view state. 

My example utilises a custom TextBox control that raises events when it’s value has changed, or had saved its ViewState.  In addition I persist the number of times it has ‘Changed’ to illustrate the key point:

• A control with ViewState disabled will still fire its Change event if the posted-back value has changed when compared with its initialized value. 

Developers often DataBind ListItem controls if (!PostBack) on Page_Load, however this results in the ViewState bloat.  An alternative is to always DataBind on Page_Init, this is particularily useful for reference data that doesn’t change often and is ‘cheap’ to load:

• A control DataBound in Page_Init routine it will still receive it’s PostBack event and post data without requiring ViewState.

Please see my View State Example project for more details.

Julian. 

I have spent a lot of time resarching the internet (and in particular other people blogs) for information on my specific agile topics of interest:

• Domain-Driven Design - Its not so much an approach as a way of thinking.
• TDD - it takes a while for devs to get hooked, but its worth it with the great tools.
• NHibernate and v. Ent Lib - but still missing the vital detail performance stats.
• I have hated CodeGen tools in the past - but i love SmartCode with its templates.
• Inversion of Control using Castle - so how powerful it can be.
• ASP.NET’s up& coming MVC Framework - Almost forces people to use good OO
• TiddlyWiki - i know i’m jumping on this one late, but i use it for all my doco now!

With all that great info out there, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to have another filtered view of the world.  So I will be following up with some articles on my own.

Stay tuned,

Julian.