LOL!

I sure feel this way sometimes.

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Just to be clear, you're actually referring to WebForms not ASP.NET?  Right?

I have decided that I will not go back to ASP.NET (WebForms) unless someone pays me _gobs_ of money.  I'm a big fan of MonoRail and looking forward to the advent of ASP.NET MVC.

Funny enough, I did some "classic" classic ASP not too long ago, and found that it was as painful as I had remembered!

Preaching to the choir... I'm very tempted by your MonoRail challenge though!

Aha, that's why I'm so unmotivated right now:  Web forms foo.  And it is totally a boiling frog scenario.  I had no idea of the pain.  In fact, I remember when I thought web forms were really cool. Hmm... MonoRail.

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Have you had a chance to compare MS MVC with Monorail yet?  I'd love to hear about the pros/cons between the two.

You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

I'm currently taking the MVC challenge.  It does feel a lot lighter than ASP.NET...

Works On My Machine

I would have been one of those people who put their hand up in that conference.

Sure, the Page is a leaky abstraction, but I work in a place where we make user and server controls for our designers to use in our sites. The level of functionality you can encapsulate in a server control for extremely easy use is pretty much unmatched by any other web technology I have used before.

If I were using *Views with *DataSources I would probably agree with you, but WebForms do address a relatively large problemspace. Maybe not as big a one as MVC style frameworks do, but it is not useless.

I'm offended by this post. I have spend a significant percentage of time in my career studying and memorizing the ASP.NET Page Lifecycle and i know all the intricacies of CreateChildControls and which events fire when you add a control to the Controls collection.

How dare you assault the castle of knowledge I have built!

;)

Seriously, though, I have a friend who is still running a significant ASP app and I looked at his code again recently and I'm thinking that ASP as a view engine with .NET behind is looking pretty darn good right now.

That's essentially what ASP.NET MVC is, I guess.

Anyone ever think: "Wouldn't it be easier if you could just give me three Dictionary<string,string>'s:  Request, Form, and Session and an output stream and I can take care of the rest?"

I guess that's what CGI is and that didn't work out too well.

Convince me that webforms sucks. Show me code that sucks / is impossible to maintain in webforms that is freaking awesome / easy to maintain in monorail.

Oh yeah tell my boss that i will take n ( 2, 3 ?) times more to do a data entry app. He sure will love to know about viewstate mess and stuff.

People want applications and want it fast. Webforms do.

I agree that WebForms makes it so easy to commingle presentation and business logic, that unit testing a web application is difficult at best, and page lifecycle issues can be nightmarish. The Postback model is great for simple pages, but I think it quickly becomes an albatross around the neck of larger applications.

On the other hand, I see a lot of value in the extensible WebForms component model. At my current company we have a number of reusable user controls that improve consistency and maintainability. Is there a similar story for creating reusable UI components in MonoRail or ASP.NET MVC?

> Trying to do anything with AJAX or DHTML with the insane control names

I would also note that this madness with IDs makes CSS also painful

I second this.

Convince me that webforms sucks. Show me code that sucks / is impossible to maintain in webforms that is freaking awesome / easy to maintain in monorail.

Not every app has to be a pillar design and technology

>I would also note that this madness with IDs makes CSS also painful

Why? If you are intent on using CSS to apply to IDs of elements, then wrap your control inside a div/span that has that ID. I'd hardly call that painful...

@Tim C:

Now I have to do EXTRA work just to get around limitations in WebForms.

Whatever short-lived productivity gains I may have accomplished during initial development start getting eaten up by stuff like massaging my HTML in order to get around the ridiculously_long_control_id's.

With [pretty much every other web framework] I don't have to do this.

Sounds good, I'm taking a look at monorail right now!

I am a senior asp.net web dev. I haven't programmed with monorail but I peeked and know the idea. I also have developed full blown applications with rails and flex.

Web Forms Cons:

Hard to unit test: You have to use MVP like strcuture. Which can be overkill

Viewstate: View state is a complex mechanism and can slow down your application

Page Life Cycle: This is also very complex and hard to learn

Generated HTML is untouchable: You have no control over the generated HTML. This makes very difficult to use 3rd party frameworks

Pros:

Distance from HTML: I never liked Html so asp.net gives some distance from html. With monorail you have to type a lot of html as well as asp.net mvc. This was also the case I quit from rails. Html is crappy and must be abtracted

Component and Event Driven: This is a great issue of ASP.NET Web forms, you can encapsulate every peace your page into sub components. This makes your application very maintenable. With MVC you would have only html snippets . And although ASP.NET MVC supports web controls not the post back ones

Ultra easy ajaxifying: You can make  any of your custom component ajax enabled just by putting it into an update panel. Same effect is dificult to achive with MVC farmeworks even if you use JQuery, ExtJs, dojo.

Ultra powerful: Have you checked ASP.NET Ajax Client Library. The logic behind is very good. Most ajax libraries are focused on widgets or communication stuff. MS client library is for interconnecting any javascript library with your components very powerful

Built in caching: Very easy partial caching or full caching

To sum up, I still prefer Web Forms, and I can't see any better technology despite the criticism. I can understand the criticism since Web forms is hard. I mean real hard. It is not as easy as ms promised or shown in their demos. when you dive in, you can be frustrated with the complexity which is why most people are disappointed. But that doesn't change that web forms is extremely powerful.

Try to do an ajaxfied gridview with internationalized sorting support + editing+ deleting. No even extjs can't do it

I think ASP.net is great to work with, maybe that's just me. The learning curve is a lot higher than classic ASP or PHP (I haven't used MonoRail) but once you understand things like the page lifecycle (events) and a number of the other concepts of ASP.net, it becomes a great language to develope in.

I disagree. I came to ASP.NET from Classic ASP/VB6 and I really enjoy developing in ASP.NET more. Yes, there's a bit of a learning curve compared to Classic ASP, but the development platform is extremely better.

And, as for working with controls using JavaScript/AJAX; all you have to do on the server to get the client-side ID of the element on the page is: [control].ClientID

I'm sick of people who don't understand webforms, and then complain about it.

A poor builder always blames his tools.

I think I worked into ASP.Net WebForms backwards from the traditional path.  Most Sr. people I've worked with began as backend coders and worked forward (towards the UI).  Thier frustrations sound a lot likes yours.  I started out as a 'wet behind the ears' DHTML developer and worked towards the lower level functionality my peers were experts in.

I am not going to defend DHTML as a simple, straight foward medium, but I've plumbed the depths of WebForms to the point that I find them easy.

Re: Control over the HTML output.

True, this is not accessible from the 'out of the box' controls, but if you create your own class that inherits, say, RadioButtonList and overload the Render method, you can have complete control over the output.

I understand the frustration with the Control Event Model, but it's just part of working with a disconnected layer like the web.  Are there better implementations?  I am sure.  I seldom have to resort to using Reflector, the debugger + online info has worked well for me.

AJAX and DHTML - see above.  That's what I started in, I don't find it difficult anymore.

Page as a leaky abstraction later.  Ok.....I guess.  I just haven't run into where this has been a significant detriment.  When you analyze any framework down to it's lowest levels, I guarentee you will find thing implemented in a less than optimal way.  That is the trade off when using a framework that abstracts away complexity.  

Wow, after reading this post I can now understand why some people think the ALT.NET guys are a bunch of douche-bags.  Spurious inflated claims that aren't even well supported.  No wonder the ALT.NET community gets some eye-rolling when they have people like you claiming to represent them.  

ASP.NET is officially unmaintainable?  

Truth ~ Jimmy Bogard doesn't like ASP.NET's WebForms model.  It may not fit well into what he's doing.  Or it may be that he's having a hard time learning it.  Either way the fact remains that thousands of people and projects use ASP.NET for many different things.

Want to know why all those people raised their hands?  ...Exactly because it is successful.

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General Microsoft Migrates MSDN &amp; TechNet to Hyper-V RC0 : Microsoft has eaten its own dog food yet again by migrating the web servers hosting MSDN and TechNet to virtual machines running inside Hyper-V RC0. Combined, the two sites serve more than

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I use Asp.net quite extensively and have built and developed many applications using asp.net since .net 1.1

Just use JQuery. Learn it, use it and find a way to make it work nicely with everything else. When you hit a snag or challenge, research and develop a solution. Thats development. Move on and do the next thing on the list...

"then fast becomes slow". Agree. Additionally I personally think that asp.net is too much of finding out when and where to do things. I.e "not in Page_Load, you must do that kind of thing in Init, or CreateChildControls" etc.  

Last, at least to me the cost of the pagehandler and viewstate simply isn't worth it, I am currently looking into my own lightweight asax handler using another sort of template engine for gui.

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I've done development in ASP.NET and MonoRail. I did enjoy MonoRail however for my last web project I decided on django and enjoyed the experience even more.