The Daily WTF

Since HTTP is fundamentally stateless, developers have found a million ways to hack state into web applications. One of my “favorites” was the ASP.NET ViewState approach.

The ViewState is essentially a dictionary, where you can store any arbitrary state values you might want to track between requests. When the server outputs HTML to send to the browser, the contents of ViewState are serialized, hashed, and base-64 encoded and dumped into an <input type=”hidden”> element. When the next request comes in, the server unpacks the hidden field and deserializes the dictionary. You can store most objects in it, if you’d like. The goal of this, and all the other WebForm state stuff was to make handling web forms more like handling forms in traditional Windows applications.

It’s “great”. It’s extra great when its default behavior is to ensure that the full state for every UI widget on the page. The

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