Lars, everyone is entitled to voice their opinion but please try and remain civil - no-one welcomes unnessary swearwords, which is why these forums have a "no profanity" rule at the bottom of every forums page.

Thanks,
Cathal

 
The only safe place to put the view state is within the view (page). Put it anywhere else, and your customers are headed for trouble, The server never knows when the ViewState has expired, so it will destroy it sooner or later. Often prematurely. Your site will become unstable and unpredictable. The most likely victims of this broken feature are users involved in a deep interaction with the site. User registration, purchase checkout and so forth. The kind of users you don't want to offend. Putting the ViewState in server memory will always fail. If not today, it will fail tomorrow when a sudden surge in visits occurs along with your expensive ad campaign or the rare lucky review from a major site. If used correctly, the ViewSate is a brilliant tool for keeping state information with the view. But it is not a data cache. A cache must be able throw out data without breaking the site.

And sorry for the profanity. I will not use that word again.

 
I don't think these other sites persist their viewstate to server memory. Putting the viewstate somewhere else is an all or nothing option. Either the ViewState is in a hidden field on the page or it is tucked away somewhere on the server awaiting destruction. The other sites you listed had some ViewState, so I think they use the ViewState as it should be used and not as a data cache.