Saw this article:
The UpdatePanel is evil
Thought what was discussed was pretty true. In some extend ASP.net does really make web application development really simple. If you want to have a page that does not do a full page postback, just drag a updatepanel etc… everything is almost drag and drop with mimimal programming as much as possible.
Many programmers (including myself) don’t really bother to see what’s going on at the background. However for this case, if my memory didn’t fail me, I remembered there’s like large (like say a couple of tens or hundreds of kb of standard ajax libraries) libraries that must be included. A simple xmlhttprequest call has to go through many extra computation also. If its just a simple personal webpage, I think its still alright, if its like a shopping cart/booking system etc type of application I think there’s just too many unnecessary work done at the background.
I come from the classic ASP/PHP camp where you have to do up the different components on your webpage yourself in pure html. No drag and drop of e.g. calendar control, etc. And when I was first exposed to ASP.net, I thought, wow this is nice, you basically can have a nice looking site, no need to really bother much about the styling since there’s some properties that allows you to change the css easier. But really this is true to some extent. I was complaining about like half a year ago (when I was doing my airplane booking system project), everything in ASP.net seems to be so easy but if you really want to change the default design of all the different controls. Like change the layout of Gridview, e.g. nesting in gridview, you probably have to search high and low, and finally come to the conclusion that there’s really no way to do what you really wanted. Probably yes, you can kindda hack it abit with incorrect HTML tags.
But something that I really like about ASP.net is the idea of Master page/ Content page.
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