Have a look at this link: https://survey.google.com/wix/p0986235.aspx
Uhm... let's have a look at the source HTML of the page, and we'll not find the "_VIEWSTATE" hidden field (it should be there also if we disable the viewstate in the @Page directly and for every control in the page) and the "__DoPostBack" Javascript method to submit the form...
I may be completely wrong, they could have removed the unused _viewstate hidden field on the server right before sending the html stream to the client, but why? Just to save 2-3 Kb?
Don't know... sounds like a "trick"... maybe they just wanted to check the reaction about the file extension...
Just to be clear: I don't find anything wrong with it, just fun
What do you think?
Carlo
"Powered by confirmit" at the end of the page might give the answer. So they are using a 3rd party survey software that happens to use ASP.NET. Or they outsourced the whole survey to a Market Research company.
Hey, this is probably an internal joke at Google!
> I may be completely wrong, they could have removed the unused _viewstate hidden field on the server right before sending the html stream to the client, but why? Just to save 2-3 Kb?
Oh, I ready about this eariler in an article about the Google homepage. In a nutshell, multiply that 2KB by a few million users and watch what it does to your bandwidth.
Judging by the naming convention of the controls, I seriously doubt that was generated by ASP.NET. Perhaps it was an ASP.NET project in prototype and now they are mapping the URLs to their production language.
Response Headers
Cache-Control no-cache
Pragma no-cache
Content-Length 14055
Content-Type text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Language en, en
Expires -1
Server Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version 2.0.50727
Date Wed, 04 Jul 2007 22:22:55 GMT
I don't see why they would fake that.
I'd guess they're storing their ViewState on the server - using something like http://www.consonica.com/SmartViewState.aspx
For anything ViewState-heavy (like - say - a survey), you could either spend hours of developer time optimizing ViewState or you could solve the problem once and for all by saving ViewState on the server(s), and spend the developer time more productively.
Looks to me like Google knows how to get the best out of ASP.NET!
I think it's a third party that's hosting the survey for Google.
If you trace the route, you'll find it actually traces to survey.ext.google.com. I think that "ext" stands for "external" at Google. In addition, the IP doesn't have the same first octet either.
I don't have a decent trace tool here (at home), so I can't check the ICANN registry easily to see who's got that IP registered.
Uhm... I'm still not convinced, I think this is just a trick (not necessarily a fake, it seems more "malicious" to me...).
Asztal, where have you found those information? If a server is "powered by ASP.NET", it does not necessarily mean that the specific page is based on ASP.NET... Looking again at the source HTML, note the "<tbody>" tags, I just checked in a sample and the CheckBoxList (and other list controls) does not output it.
Probably Martin and grauenwolf are right.
Anyway sound just weird and fun, nothing more :-)
A colleague of mine just pointed to http://www.orkut.com/, seems to use .aspx pages but Netcraft tells is running on Linux (http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=*.orkut.com).
I forgot Mono, maybe they are using it... in that case the HTML output depends on the runtime implementation (which I have to say I don't know in details), hence there might be some differences with the Windows version *-)
Just want to let you know that its perfectly possible to completely remove the viewstate tag without any big magic. All you need to do is to disable viewstate and then remove the runat="server"-attribute from the form-tag.
Yep, true... but then you would end up with a sort of "super classic ASP" without most of the nice big features of ASP.NET... anyway your're right, thanks for raising the point :-)
Have a look here:
http://www.confirmit.com/wix/p0009280.aspx?url=/download/documents/default.asp
So, they are using ASP.NET on https://survey.google.com/wix/p0986235.aspx, but survey.google.com is maybe only an "external host". If you are using nslookup you will see that it is survey.ext.google.com, and the ip addresses are not usal for google.com subdomains.
Michael
confirmit is an additional software used in Marketing research. All big MR companies uses Confirmit. It is the best software for making online surveys: www.confirmit.com