The background:
I've seen a lot of articles lately about viewstate (well, in the last two weeks or so. I'm bad about keeping up with the rss) . Scott Mitchell recently published one article on MSDN all about the viewstate, and (among other things) showed how to send less viewstate. In it he also mentioned that Scott Galloway blogged on viewstate compression using bzip2. Also of note is the Flesk viewstate optimizer. All of these allow you to send less viewstate to the client, which means that you're saving bandwidth twice -- since the browser sends the viewstate back with the next...