ViewState is a very misunderstood animal. I would like to help put an end to the madness by attempting to explain exactly how the ViewState mechanism works, from beginning to end, and from many different use cases, such as declared controls vs. dynamic controls. There are a lot of great articles out there that try to dispel the myths about ViewState. You might say this is like beating a dead horse (where ViewState is the horse, and the internet is the assailant). But this horse isn't dead, let me tell you. No, he's very much alive and he's stampeding through your living room. We need to beat him down once again. Don't worry, no horses were harmed during the authoring of this article.


http://weblogs.asp.net/infinitiesloop/archive/2006/08/03/Truly-Understanding-Viewstate.aspx