| I have recently been trimming down View State from some pages in an ASP.NET application and was looking around for tools that could help me decide where the majority of the View State was coming from. I have found some Gems and figured I would list them here in one place: |
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| ASP.NET ViewState Helper |
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| This application can be downloaded either as a seperate Windows Application or as a Fiddler extension and is by far the better tool that I came across. The reason I like this tool the most is that it only concerns itself with aiding you in cutting down your page size, it doesn't come with any other bells and whistles. It simply displays a grid showing you the total page size, total view state size and then a percentage of both the view state and markup sizes that constitue the overall page size. You can then double click on a row in the grid that contains view state in order to see the view state decoded or in it's hierarchical state. This is an excellent tool and one that I would recommend. |
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| ViewStateAnalyzer |
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| When I first came across this via Scott Guthrie's Blog I thought that this would the tool I was looking for, unfortunately I didn't get on so well with this tool as it is a bit fiddly to use and does not give me the information that I require in an easy to understand format. Don't get me wrong, I am only basing my opinions on what my requirements were at the time and this tool may well be very useful for others so I certainly recommend checking it out. However, the big downside for me is that this tool only seems to work when your ASP.NET applications are running using the built-in web server (formerly known as Cassini) and not from applications running on IIS as it navigates to an address which is similar to the page you are looking at only with a ".vsax" extension and of course IIS spits out a 404. |
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| Nikhil's Web Development Helper |
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| I have used this tool quite a lot in the past and it is a great all purpose tool allowing you to do many things such as inspect the DOM of the page and view tracing and view state information. In order to use this tool to view ASP.NET information it must be installed as an HTTP Module (done by configuring the web.config file). The only problem I had with this tool is that sometimes the ASP.NET specific tools would stop working, I am not sure why and when it does work it is very useful but this is what led me to search for other view state tools. |
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| View State Decoder 2.1 |
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| This tool is similar to the ASP.NET ViewState Helper application in that it is an external Windows Application and it only concerns itself with View State, showing you the raw, decoded and hierarchical views. However, I could not get this tool to decode any view state I pointed it too so needless to say I cannot really comment on how good it is although I do like the fact that it is not bloated with loads of functionality. |