.NET Viewstate Helper

I saw this tool on Chris Crowe’s blog. It’s a pretty neat small tool that helps you track viewstate issues. Now if you have been working with ASP.NET, the chances are very high that you are working with viewstate, even if you don’t know it. You often have to decide what to store in the viewstate as it can make a big difference on the page’s total size which makes a difference as to how long it gets down to the client.

“ASP.NET ViewState Helper is an application designed to help all web developers, but has specific features to aid ASP.NET developers track ViewState issues. In real-time you can see your web pages being analyzed while you browse to them using Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher. As you can see in this Screen Shot, ASP.NET ViewState Helper gives you very detailed information to help you optimize your web application’s performance. You can see page information like:

Page’s total size: This is the total size of the web page shown in the URL column
ViewState size: This is the size of the ViewState field
ViewState %: What percent of the total page size is being taken up by the ViewState?
Markup size: The size of html markup (non-visible text) on the page
Markup %: What percent of the page consists of non-visible HTML markup?”

Some of the key features include:

“Compatible with Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0
Compatible with Windows 2000, XP and Vista
Works in real-time to give you detailed page information
Analyzes all webpages, even pages inside frames
ViewState decoding works with ASP.NET v1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 applications
Only a 300k download with a quick and easy installer”

Check out the screenshot below where I was browsing the viewstate on www.asp.net:

Download links can be found here:
x86 – http://www.binaryfortress.com/go.php?http://www.binaryfortress.com/Files/ASPNETViewStateHelper/ASP.NET_ViewState_Helper_v0.6_x86.exe

x64 – http://www.binaryfortress.com/go.php?http://www.binaryfortress.com/Files/ASPNETViewStateHelper/ASP.NET_ViewState_Helper_v0.6_x64.exe