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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T23:19:28+00:00

I help develop a relatively high traffic web application that uses ASP.NET WebForms. Although

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I help develop a relatively high traffic web application that uses ASP.NET WebForms. Although our use of viewstate is relatively small, we do require it currently.

When deploying a change to the main masterpage, we frequently cause currently connected users to receive an error when they next issue a POST request. The reason for this is that the viewstate tree that exists in their POST request no longer matches what the server expects to be posted. Since we are a web application, many of our pages do POST.

The full error is of course:

Failed to load viewstate. The control tree into which viewstate is being loaded must match the control tree that was used to save viewstate during the previous request. For example, when adding controls dynamically, the controls added during a post-back must match the type and position of the controls added during the initial request.

Naturally, this is highly frustrating for our users. At the moment, we try to:

  1. Minimize changes to the masterpage (at least, changes which involve server controls)
  2. Deploy in low traffic periods

I have thought about doing tricks with load balancer affinity to try force newly logging in users to the newly deployed version, while keeping currently logged in users on the old version – but this seems hugely complex and maintaining multiple codebases on production isn’t really where I want to go.

I appreciate the technology isn’t really our friend here, but just wondered if anyone had any tips or techniques they use to mitigate this issue.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    What I did for something similar: I turned off Viewstate, and created a hidden field in the master page which encrypted a guid and date and time. I used this guid and date and time to reference some values in a shared cache.

    The data was small and transient and didn’t need to be kept around very long. And depending on volume and how long you can keep that cache data around, it’s also possible to see how long people ‘stick’ to pages.

    There are plenty of open source shared cache solutions that are tuned specifically for this type of role.

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