I remember the days of coding my site by hand in Notepad.
I remember the days of Microsoft Visual Interdev 1.0. Every page would have a bunch of includes, and a whole lot of manual ADO Recordsets. <% Do While Not RS.EOF %> was in my blood. I did a 4000 page Intranet that way for crying out loud.
Then I started gravitating to the DBA side of the force.
Time passed.
The entire .NET thing started happening, and I was a beta tester for VB.NET. I bugged out of the program by beta 2 because of disillusionment I intend to write about extensively in the future. At the time, the entire point of ASP.NET somehow escaped me... and never truly tried it out.
When I did take a second look, about two years later, I was amazed.
Disgusted. It did to Web development what Visual Basic did to desktop development. Still, it seemed somewhat toy-ish. Round-trips up the wazoo, designer-generated code polluting your page classes, it was a Very Good Idea™, but not ready for prime time.
I tuned out again. A few weeks ago, I tuned back in.
Now there is no pollution because of partial classes. What remains is round-trips. Enter Atlas, or even worse, a full set of AJAX-enabled controls such as the set from telerik. It's not fair. Cross-browswer, automatic, non-post-back grids (no post-back for sorting, paging, et cetera), styled, on-demand load dropdowns...
Did I mention it is not fair?