Posts What Is Wrong with ASP.NET Web Forms?
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What Is Wrong with ASP.NET Web Forms?

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Traditional ASP.NET Web Forms development was great in principle, but reality proved more complicated: . • View State weight: The actual mechanism for maintaining state across requests (known as View State) results in large blocks of data being transferred between the client and server. This data can reach hundreds of kilobytes in even modest Web applications, and it goes back and forth with every request, leading to slower response times and increasing the bandwidth demands of the server.

• Page life cycle: The mechanism for connecting client-side events with server-side event handler code, part of the page life cycle, can be extraordinarily complicated and delicate. Few developers have success manipulating the control hierarchy at runtime without getting View State errors or finding that some event handlers mysteriously fail to execute.

• False sense of separation of concerns: ASP.NET Web Forms’ code-behind model provides a means to take application code out of its HTML markup and into a separate code-behind class. This has been widely applauded for separating logic and presentation, but, in reality, developers are encouraged to mix presentation code (for example, manipulating the server- side control tree) with their application logic (for example, manipulating database data) in these same monstrous code-behind classes. The end result can be fragile and unintelligible.

• Limited control over HTML: Server controls render themselves as HTML, but not necessarily the HTML you want. In early versions of ASP.NET, the HTML output failed to meet with Web standards or make good use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and server controls generated unpredictable and complex ID attribute values that are hard to access using JavaScript. These problems are much improved in recent Web Forms releases, but it can still be tricky to get the HTML you expect.

• Leaky abstraction: Web Forms tries to hide HTML and HTTP wherever possible. As you try to implement custom behaviors, you frequently fall out of the abstraction, which forces you to reverse-engineer the postback event mechanism or perform obtuse acts to make it generate the desired HTML. Plus, all this abstraction can act as a frustrating barrier for competent Web developers.

• Low testability: The designers of Web Forms could not have anticipated that automated testing would become an essential component of software development. Not surprisingly, the tightly coupled architecture they designed is unsuitable for unit testing. Integration testing can be a challenge, too.

Web Forms isn’t all bad and Microsoft has put a lot of effort into improving standards compliance, simplifying the development process, and even taking some features from ASP.NET MVC. Web Forms excels when you need quick results, and you can have a reasonably complex web app up and running within a day. But unless you are careful during development, you will find that the application you create is hard to test and hard to maintain.

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