Framework Design, Agile Coach, President Oklahoma City Developers Group, Microsoft MVP C#, TDD, Continuous Integration, Patterns and Practices, Domain Driven Design, Speaker, VB.Net, C# and Sql Server
I was away from my computer all weekend, so I'm playing a bit of catchup today on my blog posts. There is no direct upper limit on the size of a viewstate. Limitations come into play when the browser limits the size of hidden fields. A capability to look for in Whidbey is chunking view-state. This is intended for situations where the view-state field becomes very large and certain firewalls or proxies may prevent a page if a hidden field is considered to be too big. In this case, a developer will be able to configure the view-state so it can be broken into multiple hidden fields. This is accomplished by the developer providing a cut-off size for a single view-state field. The cut-off size will have no upper or lower limit, although setting the cut-off to be very low will hurt performance. This can be valuable when dealing with large datasets bound to datagrids and other instances where you get a very large viewstate. Be aware though, this chunking capability doesn't replace the fact that viewstates should be kept as small as possible, and even turned off where applicable.
About Raymond Lewallen
Working primarily in the public sector during his career, Raymond has designed and built several high profile enterprise level applications for all levels of the government. Raymond now works as a solutions architect for EMC. Raymond is an agile coach, Microsoft MVP C# and also president of the Oklahoma City Developers Group and Oklahoma Agile Developers Group. Raymond spends a lot of his time learning and teaching such things as Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, Design Patterns and Extreme Programming practices and principles, to name a few. Raymond is also an advocate of Alt.Net. Raymond is primarily a framework guy, so don't ask him anything about UI :)