Post Prolog: Out of the record, as a continues to the previous post, I want to say that I am enjoing my life as a father, if I had know it I would do it earlier, BTW the little one named by my wife and me as Ori. More pics will be publish soon...)

Now, to this post issue...

I bumped in on a strange scenario; In my current working application, I have a page that holds a repeater that displays some data. This data is being declared in each partner's web.config's configSection. In order to read it once, I set this custom object as a Serializable one (which implements the ISerializable interface of course) and saved it into the ViewState of the page.

Now, when reading this object and saving it into the ViewState, everything has worked just fine (the server serialized this data properly).
But, when trying to grab this data from the ViewState (de-serialize this data) an annoying and vauge error message has been displayed was saying that: "The state information is invalid for this page and might be corrupted".

After a long and frustrating research about it, it turns out that the server will have NO KNOWLEDGE of the assembly name (Note: It was randomly generated when your site compiled on first run) because its own version of that assembly will have been compiled with a completely different random name, and it will not be able to de-serialise the viewstate and get the requested data.

To get around this problem, we should AVOID PLACING custom types into the viewstate (place'em somewhere else, like session, application etc.).

If you've got some more complex objects (or some custom types), these will need to be moved into a seperate class library project that is pre-compiled before deploying to the web-server. By doing it, it can be ensured that every web server has a copy of the same assembly and that the assembly has the same signature/name!  Try to avoid creating custom types in your App_Code or any of your web site files.  Rather create custom types in their own project to be compiled into a seperate assembly.

Cheers by now...