I have worked with ASP.Net for a decent chunk of time and it does have quite a few decent controls and it makes web development insanely easy but there are two things that really bug me in ASP.Net.
  • ViewState & ControlState
  • PostBacks

ViewState and ControlState seem to be attempts to force a state to work in a stateless environment. The web is stateless and it feels akward and almost hacky to me that objects gets serialized and put into a hidden field. The web wasn't meant to work that way and it adds extra bloat to the pages. Let's face it, ASP.Net can be used well to eliminate this but I have not worked with one developer who did so. In fact, everyone I've worked with or seen that use ASP.Net heavily rely on ViewState or ControlState.

PostBacks are my #1 annoyance on the web and ASP.Net makes it not only easy but practically encourages doing so using events. They can break back and refresh functionality in the web browser and they're not intuitive as it will cause the screen to flash and make the user lose their place at times (depending on what the postback is doing) especially if the user started to enter information into another box while the browser is trying to post back (I can't tell you how many times I hit tab on an input, start typing in another input and then the postback finishes and I lose the data in the second input. Ugh!).

Am I the only one?