Viewstate never really bothered me, if you are building pages with so many controls that it becomes a problem you should probably think about breaking that page

Viewstate never really bothered me, if you are building pages with so many controls that it becomes a problem you should probably think about breaking that page up into multiple pages. I do agree about ASP.net ajax though. That is very cumbersome to work with. Jquery with asp.net mvc is a much needed improvement. They just need to come up with a better ORM imo and they will be set. Activerecord just seems a whole lot cleaner than Linq to me.