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Another day, another puzzle. This time, binding a multidimensional array to a Data Grid View Control. Ok, so it would be a lot simpler to just bind the data source directly to the control, but in this case I had to make a fair few tricky transformations to the data. Long story short - how do I dump my data into the grid view control at run time? The solution provided here proved perfect.

So why would you want to get rid of the html hidden viewstate field from your aspx files? My reason was that I was using the gridview control on a page and changing the response.content to excel Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel" to act as quick data extract into a spreadsheet - messy but it works, at least it did in classic ASP. Moving to ASP.NET and adding a form and gridview control drops in the __VIEWSTATE form field which then ends up in the first row of the spreadsheet.