Question

I was looking at this article from 2005 and wanted to get some thoughts on it, advantages and disadvantages that the article does not point out about ViewState and Cache?

http://www.codersource.net/asp_net_viewstate_versus_data_caching.aspx

Answer 1

That article is poor – why confuse the Cache and Viewstate in the same article? It’s like saying ‘in this article I compare the car and the can opener… conclusion: choose which best suits your needs’. I would ignore that for starters.

For most users starting out with ASP.NET, viewstate can be completely disabled. Here is a proper article explaining Viewstate (and more generally the page lifecycle):

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972976.aspx

Caching on the otherhand is an essential technique for improving performance of both individual page requests and a site as a whole.