There are a lot of music players in the market that you can use in order to listen to music such as Windows Media Player, Winamp and JetAudio. But if you’re familiar with the Apple or you have one or more Apple products including iPod, iPhone, iPad and …, you can’t begin to use any other media player applications except the iTunes. These days iTunes becomes very popular and nearly all people I know believe that the iTunes is the most powerful and popular media player in the world. iTunes includes a store section that enables users to download music, movies, and even applications for their Apple products.

iTunes Store

The iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple. Opening as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, with over 200,000 items to purchase, it is, as of April 2008, the number-one music vendor in the United States. On 24 February 2010, the store served its 10 billionth song download; this major milestone being reached in just under seven years of being online. iTunes accounts for 70% of worldwide online digital music sales, making the service the largest legal music retailer. While most downloaded files have previously included restrictions on their use, enforced by FairPlay, Apple's implementation of digital rights management, iTunes initiated a shift into selling DRM-free music in most countries, marketed as iTunes Plus. On January 6, 2009, Apple announced that DRM had been removed from 80% of the entire music catalog in the US. Full iTunes Plus availability was achieved on April 7, 2009 in the US, coinciding with the introduction of a three-tiered pricing model.

The following photo is the iTunes Store’s first page. You can click the picture for a full-size view:

iTunes is now the #1 music retailer in the world. – Steve Jobs

There’s bunch of cool features that you can use in order to download and your favorite music/movie/application but this is not what I’m going to talk about.

Companies like Apple has boycotted Iran from their products and services so you can’t download any kind of files from iTunes Store if your IP address is in Iran.

A couple of days ago, I was searching throw the iTunes store and searched for the word “Hichkas” and I shocked after I saw the result:

The results contain latest released by Hichkas and if you take a look at the other items in the result window, you can see some other Iranian albums which are all available to download right from the iTunes store!

Conclusion

Now you can download every kind of media you want right from the iTunes Store and as you know, it’s not too expansive. I’m sure that most of you can afford it.

By the way, this is very good news for Iranian music providers to put their releases to the iTunes Store so everyone in the world can download and listen to them; and it’s very surprising that the iTunes Store is not limited to music! You can download/rent movies, podcasts, etc.

Hope it helps.

The first thing you should know before I continue is the definition of ViewState:

View state refers to the page-level state management mechanism, utilized by the HTML pages emitted by ASP.NET applications to maintain the state of the web form controls and widgets. The state of the controls is encoded and sent to the server at every form submission in a hidden field known as __VIEWSTATE. The server sends back the variable so that when the page is re-rendered, the controls render at their last state. At the server side, the application may change the ViewState, if the processing requires a change of state of any control. The states of individual controls are decoded at the server, and are available for use in ASP.NET pages using the ViewState collection.

When you’re developing an ASP.NET Web-Forms application and the performance is a consideration, you can disable the ViewState in some of your pages that you don’t want to make use of. Disabling ViewState will affect the page’s HTML source code a lot and removes a lot of useless codes from your page as you can see in the picture below:

A website that disabled the ViewState:

Another website that let the ViewState being enabled:

You can see the difference between two pictures above. So disabling the ViewState is something necessary if you don’t want to use it.

But unfortunately, some of the controls in ASP.NET such as RadioButtonList need to use the ViewState under any circumstances! So you CANNOT disable the ViewState if you need to use these kinds of controls.

I think is an ASP.NET bug so I reported is to the Microsoft. I believe, about 70%-80% of ASP.NET developers don’t want to use the ViewState at least in some of their pages.