Asp – How does the Multiview control handle its Viewstate

I've defined the following property as we use this often in unit testing.

public static string AssemblyDirectory
{
    get
    {
        string codeBase = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase;
        UriBuilder uri = new UriBuilder(codeBase);
        string path = Uri.UnescapeDataString(uri.Path);
        return Path.GetDirectoryName(path);
    }
}

The Assembly.Location property sometimes gives you some funny results when using NUnit (where assemblies run from a temporary folder), so I prefer to use CodeBase which gives you the path in URI format, then UriBuild.UnescapeDataString removes the File:// at the beginning, and GetDirectoryName changes it to the normal windows format.

I have used MultiViews as a more flexible basis for a Wizard control.

I do agree that lumping lots of views together is a code smell. In the case of a wizard there are often lots of pieces of state you want to share throughout the process. The multiview allows this state to be simply stored in the viewstate.

Most of the time I make the contents of each view a single user control that it can encapsulate the logic related to that particular step.