Problems/Issues with Asp.Net WebForms

Why ASP.NET Web Forms?

• Success of Microsoft programming languages right from the days of VB (visual basic) it is due to RAD(Rapid application development)and visual programming approach

• By using visual studio ,developers where able to drag drop UI elements on a designer area and at the backend , visual studio generates C# or VB.NET code for those elements

Problems with Asp. Net Web Forms:

• The main problem with ASP.NET Web form is performance

• In web application there are two aspects which define performance

• Response time: - How fast the server responds to request?.
• Bandwidth consumption: - How much data is sent ?.

Response time issues:

We did a small load testing experiment of Webform vs Asp.Net MVC and we found Asp.Net MVC to be twice faster.

Why ASP.NET MVC was better in performance in the above load test:

Problem: Asp.Net webforms page life cycle.

Solution for this problem: - “GET RID of CODE BEHIND” ,fold your sleeves and work with pure HTML.

Bandwidth consumption:

• View state has been a very dear and near friend of ASP.NET developers.
• We found viewstate increases the page size twice as compared to Asp.Net MVC.

Problem: Maintaining server controls data across the post back.

Solution for this problem: - “GET RID of SERVER CONTROLS”.

Other Problems:

HTML customization:

For example see the below ASPX code, can you guess what kind of HTML it will generate.

Label generates a SPAN , Literal generates simple text , Panel generates DIV tag

Note: To verify same, just request a page with above controls and see the view page source(Right Click and Select the Page Source in your browser).

Re-usability of code behind class:

If you watch any professional ASP.NET Web form project you will notice that code behind class is where you have huge amount of code and the code is really complicated.

Problem: We can't reuse the code behind class for other pages.

Solution for this problem: - “GET RID of SERVER CONTROLS and CODE BEHIND”.

Are you wondering, How these problems get resolved in Asp.Net MVC ?

Please see my blog post "MVC Request Flow".