I’ve been working on a new ASP.NET app at work, which gives me a new opportunity to complain about ASP.NET.

One of my ongoing struggles with ASP.NET is figuring out the correct sequence that page and control events are fired in.  I find myself constantly stepping through code to figure out whether SelectedIndexChanged events happen before or after DataBind events or between the Load event and PreRender event or some other such nonsense.  It drives me crazy because it’s something I never have to do in PHP.  (Because you get to write your own page life cycle.)  It’s really tempting sometimes to just override Page.Render() and do everything myself.

And don’t get me started on UpdatePanels.  This is the second project in a row where I simply can’t get them to work right.  “AJAX is so simple in ASP.NET!” they said.  “Just drop an UpdatePanel in there and it just works!”  Yeah, right.  Take my advice and stick with jQuery or even hand-coded Javascript.  It’s much less painful.