A server control's view state is the accumulation of all its property values. In order to preserve these values across HTTP requests, ASP.NET server controls use this property, which is an instance of the System.Web.UI.StateBag class, to store the property values. The values are then passed as a variable to an HTML hidden input element when subsequent requests are processed. For more information about saving server control view state, see ASP.NET State Management Overview.

View state is enabled for all server controls by default, but there are circumstances in which you will want to disable it. For more information, see Performance Overview.

For information about dictionaries and how to use them, see Collections and Data Structures.