- Amazement at how little code or markup you need to write in order to spit out a bunch of html
- Confusion over this “Postback” thing
- Slowly growing comfort with the “Page Life Cycle” and its foibles
- Eagerness to use more controls, especially those new-fangled “Ajax” ones
- Happiness over how quickly pretty good applications could be written
- Frustration at the quality of the html that gets spit out
- More frustration over state-management (view state? session variables? hidden form fields? cookies? client-side caching? server side caching? AARRGGHH!!)
- Yet more frustration with the hoops you have to jump through with the Page Life Cycle
- Even more frustration with the Update Panel and the general clumsiness of ASP.NET Ajax
- Hope that tools like jQuery will help deal with the above frustrations
You may have noticed a trend. :-) Like many, I think I have grown slowly weary of the idiosyncrasies of the Web Forms engine and its “Leaky Abstraction” problems. In our zeal to abstract away the complexities of a naturally stateless web environment, we’ve accepted abstractions piled upon abstractions piled upon more abstractions. I can’t help but feel we’ve arrived at a point where, despite creating abstractions to simplify web development, the weight of the abstractions (or, more precisely, the weight of the leaks) have complicated things more than they’ve helped.