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I'm maintaining an ASP.NET Webforms 4.5 application for a few months and frankly i'm fed up with server controls. So i switched to pure HTML and Javascript for front end, when creating new content (or fixing the old, assuming there was enough time). Almost (for reusability reasons) all new requests to the server are done via ajax calls.

I'm happy, designers are happy, coworkers prefer it and the client seems to like the new ajax functionality very much.

Are there any drawbacks i should be aware of while doing so?

Dante
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  • You might consider using a javascript framework, such as BackboneJS, KnockoutJS, Angular, Ember, etc. It might help clean up the javascript. That's the only warning I can give you. – Richard Aug 19 '13 at 15:28
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    I'd argue you should consider using ASP.NET MVC instead of Webforms. It's much more amenable to using raw html. Postbacks are of the devil ;) – Michael Brown Aug 19 '13 at 15:29

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Overhead

If nothing in your app is going to use the webforms model you are generating a lot of business with events, control/view states and what not that is just in the way and sucking cycles.

Also, if you are doing this now, why ajax and not json? it is smaller, moves across frameworks better and is supported by more platform agnostic scripts.

If you are doing this in a section of the app, and the rest of the app is more traditional webforms then 100% you can do this, but if you are rebuilding the app with no webforms features then I would consider getting off the webform project type.

Bill
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  • As far as I know ajax is a way of sending a request to server avoiding a post back (rendering html) to happen in server side so that user does not experience redirection between pages and json is a way for serializing and deserializing data, so I am a bit confused when you say "why ajax and not json?". – Beatles1692 May 12 '15 at 10:07
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    AJAX = asynchronous JavaScript and XML, my point was in this case the XML would be needless overhead in a fresh start when so many things support json these days - in the context he is describing I assumed he was discussing the MS AJAX bits which don't switch to AJAJ nicely Some libraries do both nicely, the webforms ones don't in my opinion, and the earlier ones don't at all. – Bill May 20 '15 at 19:02
  • Aren't we still using ajax for sending and receiving json ? for example we have this nice ajax method in JQuery that works with json nicely :) BTW I've got your point. Thanks – Beatles1692 May 21 '15 at 09:39