[polskibus]

In my opinion the worst thing about WebForms were statefulness almost everywhere and very complicated page lifecycle including the refresh of nested components. For small applications it's great, but has problems when you're trying a large, dynamic product. Composability is much easier with MVC, where you can link to controller actions instead of always depending on the way nested controls process postback events and rebuild themselves.

[Pxtl]

Exactly. I actually kinda liked the ideas behind WebForms - the ViewState thing was a clever way to shoehorn statefulness into the Web. But the abstractions in it were so leaky and brittle as to be worse-than-useless. The page lifecycle was a nightmare, data-binding was frustratingly finicky about types and parameters (and it was always a roll of the dice whether a given component would use empty strings or nulls to indicate an empty value) and so on.

Web forms was full of half-assed abstractions. Every postback it re-built your control tree and re-applied the viewstate, but any actual additions or removals of controls made in code-behind were not part of this rebuild and viewstate application, so it completely half-assed the control rebuild and thrashed its own abstraction. If you added a new control dynamically on one postback, you had to re-add it every postback, which demolishes the stateful model it presents with respect to the properties of controls.