i hate webforms
posted on 09:28 10/30/2009 by planetidiot.com
I just found this (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/46031/why-does-the-asp-net-web-forms-model-suck) and while there are some guys who clearly have invested a significant portion of their careers to doing .net with webforms and probably write very nice sites, I have never seen anything but pure horror when it comes to webforms. And looking around the only people who seem to agree with me are .net hating php/jsp developers.posted on 09:28 10/30/2009 by planetidiot.com
So it is really refreshing to read people actually agreeing with me on this. I took one look at webforms in .net 1.0 7-8 years ago, and said "Why? Do we have to use this?" My manager said no, so we ignored it. We built classes, we rolled our own html and javascript and we had a clean, light weight web application that was easy to debug, maintain and modify.
Since then, any time I've had to work on a webforms site, it's always to fix a mangled mess broken in some horrible way that's impossible to debug, and all I can repeat is "WHY?" If you know html, if you know javascript, css, object oriented programming (and clearly whoever built these messes didn't) there's absolutely no reason for webforms to exist. I have never encountered a situation where it would get me anything I couldn't do without it. It just appeared to me to be a crutch for vb winform developers who didn't know html. "Drag, drop, wee! I'm a web developer!"
Now if you've been doing webforms the "right" way (and the only reason I say this is some people seem to know what they are talking about on the pro-webforms side) then I can see how it's easy to say "well, this guy just doesn't know what the hell he's doing". Fair enough, but I'll point you back to my original question: Why? Why would I want to spend the amount of time you spent becoming an expert with this technology? If I'm not making winforms applications then what good does this huge volume of knowledge you've spent years accumulating going to do for me, when I can build a clean, compact website using half the resources that's easy to debug? I already have a great set of tools. Why would I want to unlearn how the web actually works and subscribe to a temporary microsoft sponsored stop-gap for VB developers?
And surprise, here comes microsoft with MVC, talking about clean html and jquery. We are thankfully coming to the end of the webforms debacle. I just wish I could find a decent explanation on the how's and why's of MVC. In the meantime I'm doing what I've always done: Writing classes, generating clean html and having zero problems debugging code.
And before anyone goes apeshit picking apart planetidiot.com: keeping my personal website code up to date is my absolute last priority. The last time I rebuilt it I was just learning about CSS. So I'll save you the effort: you've got tables everywhere, you've got old style capitalized tags, and it's in serious need of an overhaul. Maybe rebuilding it will be my first MVC experiment :) What you won't find is a 30 page long viewstate hidden field, 500kb of MS generated javascript or a broken back button.
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