Early ASP.net was a fairly awful experience for the web stuff I did. ASP.net 1 and it was missing a lot of basic functionality that came in .net 2 and was not c

Early ASP.net was a fairly awful experience for the web stuff I did. ASP.net 1 and it was missing a lot of basic functionality that came in .net 2 and was not compatible with the stuff we had created in .net 1 to fill the gaps. Visual Studio was fragile, it would work great one day/week, then one system update or one change to a project setting would be enough to make it crawl or crash. And to top it off we had the burden is having to use visual source safe as well. Then add the need to have a local IIS and SQL Server, required a seriously beefy spec desktop to run. The ASP.net viewstate was geared up for single page CRUD applications and trying to do any kind of multiple website required serious abuse of session storage (DB backed and hideously slow to serialise and unserialise each time) to maintain state across pages. We created a handful of helpers to utilise querystrings efficiently. ASP form validators often suffered edge case bugs, the javascript validations often fail and hard to debug, server side validation added an extra layer of slowness and trying to juggle everything to load, save, validate, update the html between the layers of state management (application, session, view etc) lead to some horribly complex code to work around the opaque-ness of asp.net state management. Entity framework was welcomed, but it was almost unusable to start with it as suffered critical inconstancies between 32bit and 64bit machines in the way it handled the length of integers and stored them in the EF defined databases. But it was not all terrible, C# was a pleasant language, polymorphism useful, unit testing (nunit) worked well, Team Foundation Server is worth a mention for being a zillion times better than Source Safe. Linq was a sane abstraction. By 2007/2008 MVC looked promising and Visual Studio Pro ran quite reasonable on current spec machines and the things around .net such as SQL Server and IIS were far more pleasant to install and work with on desktop machines. PS, Let's not forget the MSDN library, documentation and software on CD/DVD and having to strategize what you can fit on your HDD and what you will load from disk.