Yeah, as much pain as it has caused me in the past I think the crucial realization Microsoft made with Webforms and maybe Blazor is that the stateless model of web is fairly crap if you are doing anything beyond displaying static text.

For its time it was some cool tech.

Asp.net web forms absolutely sucked. They fundamentally misunderstood HTML and how the internet even worked.

Modern Razor's pretty good (not Razor Pages, they also suck) which is probably what you mean.

But it's not that much different from Rails, Laravel, Django, etc.

Yes I mean the original version of it.

I'd love to watch people attempt to implement some of the stuff I pulled off with that back in the day now. Occasionally, very complex data driven page flows are required and you could nail that entire problem domain trivially with them.

There is a very large and well known company with a front-facing product used by millions of people which took 5 years pissing around with three different front end technologies to reimplement what we did in 3 months with that and it was slower and heavier and basically reimplemented web forms in python in the end.

It broke the the www intentionally because it sucked. And it still does.

Speaking as someone who is still maintaining a web forms app, that sounds like a people problem, not a tech problem. You can implement literally any workflow if you understand continuations, and it will be simpler and more lightweight than web forms.

If you don't understand continuations, then you'll struggle and invent all sorts of poor state management patterns. Web forms simplifies some of this because the continuation is captured in viewstate, but it captures too much state (there are other warts too of course).

What’s wrong with razor pages? They’re fantastically simple and productive.

And WebForms wasn't a misunderstanding. It was a deliberate and brilliant design that brought WinForm developers and their experience to the web and allowed them to build complex web apps two decades ago that still work to this day.

Yeah, and as soon as soon as they tried doing that, they found out it was all superficial and the fact that there was HTTP calls inbetween meant everything started falling over and they saw weird behaviour. And instead of learning how to work with state management in general, they learnt how to work with WebForm's state management instead.

I'm working on one of those webforms projects right now, a legacy project that they need some fairly trivial tweaks to and it's an absolute nightmare of bad code. And I've done this before, it's become an accidental skill that I can still fix these awful messes.

One of the (many) reasons why webforms and the new Razor Pages are bad is because the code gets split up according to the UI instead of by function. So it gets scattered all over the place and is incredibly hard to do maintenance work on it.

The page-centric code layout that Webforms/Razor Pages/all the old PHP/Perl/etc. encourage is also extremely conducive in encouraging copy-and-pasta code for programmers trying to get stuff done asap.

So not only is it a nightmare to pick apart the code, you can often fine 2 or 3 copies of the same code that you only discover when one page is working as expected, but the same functionality is used somewhere else but someone just copied the page/control instead of actually splitting the page up into controls and re-using functionality.

I've seen this happen over and over and over. A single developer can avoid these pitfalls, a team cannot.

It's contextual. For me, WebForms fell down because it let the average web developer impose too many "costs" on internet-facing projects. A WinForms developer is a very specific kind of developer with a high focus on development of internal, or line-of-business (LOB) apps. WebForms also excelled at this, but brought more reach as people moved away from a preference for desktop apps.

The height of WebForms coincided with an embrace of web standards and accessibility which flows into the Web 2.0 era. You had to jump through a lot of hoops to achieve what was needed WebForms to get it to behave in a web-friendly way. The underlying .NET framework and base of ASP.NET (HttpHandler and HttpModule) was outstanding though.

(I still build/maintain WinForms, ASP.NET, and WPF apps.)

> people moved away from a preference for desktop apps.

Who did; which "people"?

Corporations and "Web developers" maybe; users never asked for it AFAIK.

WebForms was a complete disaster, made solely to allow Microsoft salesmen to quickly slap together a demo.

The problems started when you wanted to put together a REAL application. Because the entire paradigm of a web application programmed like a desktop application was flawed it resulted into an endless stream of headaches and workarounds, with bloated, complex and slow applications as a result.

In that sense ASP.NET MVC was a breath of fresh air.

I just remember massive state being injected into forms, and it wasn't pretty, was massive at times and just unpleasant regarding WebForms. It was fine for internal apps with a network connection, the experience was horrible if you were a dialup user. Especially in components that a change triggered effectively a full server round trip to update the whole page.

It got better by ASP.Net 3, but MVC/Razor was much, much better imo.

By Modern Razor you mean Blazor components?

Razor Pages.

Please, go learn about Remix (https://remix.run), it is the actual correct answer for this stuff.

I don't understand why they choose an example -- a simple user dashboard -- that could be easily implemented as a traditional MPA. It seems like Remix is mainly for the "I learned to program with SPAs" audience.

Remix's _messaging_ may be aimed at the "SPA generation", but its capabilities are light years beyond a Rails w/ Turbolinks or whatever your concept of a traditional MPA might use. I'd encourage you to look a little closer.

My kneejerk rxn was "clearly you don't get it" -- but your critique and (mis)perception speak to their marketing / messaging, which, well, yeah, this is the world we live in. SPA has become the default, and Remix is pushing back on that, hard, and I'm stoked.

I've been doing webdev for a living since 1998, and Remix (like https://every-layout.dev 's "axiomatic css" - but I digress) is doing something profoundly powerful by leveraging the amazing power of the web platform on its terms, using the native APIs, and doing much, much more by being simpler and doing less. It's so refreshing.

Why does it kill you to say that? It’s the better and more productive option.

Because I abandoned it thinking it was terrible. Then I spent a decade finding out how bad everything else was.