Why bother using ViewState?

[CoolAmir]

Hi guys =) I'm wondering why ViewState is used while Session & Cache are out there? :~ Thanx guys

[Ali Iqbal Khan]

See this link and you'll find the reason http://www.w3schools.com/aspnet/aspnet_viewstate.asp[^] Ali

[CoolAmir]

Thanx Ali. I better make my question more clear. Better to say "Why Microsoft bothered inserting form's state info in hidden fields in HTML files while they (!) could use Session or Cache?" ;P

[Sebastien Lachance]

I think this is because of performance. My Blog

[minhpc_bk]

Hi there, + As you already know that ViewState is used to store page-specific data, while Session is for user-specific, and Cache is to store data which can be accessed by all users. If you use Session to store a page-specific variable, the sample code is something like this:

Session["PageID+Key"] = value;

also for the Cache object:

Cache["PageID+UserID+Key"] = value;

I believe that this's not a good practice to follow. + The Session object might consume lots of memory to store data, then it can affect the performance of the application. + Data saved in the Cache object can be accessible to all users of the application, so you need to take this thing into account when you use the Cache object to store page-specific data. Well, just some ideas.

[CoolAmir]

I got some ideas now. ( by reading replies here) I guess because these data are often useless to other web forms, they do not need to exist further than current page/request scope. :^) Great comments, thanx :-D