View State is the method to preserve the Value of the Page and Controls between round trips. It is a Page-Level State Management technique. View State is turned on by default and normally serializes the data in every control on the page regardless of whether it is actually used during a post-back.
A web application is stateless. That means that a new instance of a page is created every time when we make a request to the server to get the page and after the round trip our page has been lost immediately
Features of View State
- Retains the value of the Control after post-back without using a session.
- Stores the value of Pages and Control Properties defined in the page.
- Creates a custom View State Provider that lets you store View State Information in a SQL Server Database or in another data store.
Advantages of View State - Easy to Implement.
- No server resources are required: The View State is contained in a structure within the page load.
- Enhanced security features: It can be encoded and compressed or Unicode implementation.