[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.