What is the best method for storing viewstate in an ASP.Net mobile web application?

Question

I'm curious what techniques you find to be the best for storage and maintaining of viewstate with respect to an ASP.Net application running within a mobile web browser (i.e. Treo with Windows Mobile, or Blackberry Curve web browser).

Answer 1

If you use the mobile controls, the view state can actually be stored in the session instead so it doesn't eat bandwidth. See this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cteh3e77.aspx for more about mobile controls and maintaining state.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Some of the mobile controls still store settings in ways that older phones may not support. If you are targeting older mobile phones, you should either change your session settings to cookieless or start using the HiddenVariables collection instead (which older phones can use). We used hiddenvariables since changing our whole site over to cookieless was not an option. However, hiddenvariables can only be strings so you will need to be ready to serialize objects into hidden fields as strings, just like viewstate does.