Question

Although ASP.NET MVC seems to have all the hype these days, WebForms are still quite pervasive. How do you keep your project sane? Let’s collect some tips here.

Answer 1

• Create web user controls for anything that will be shown on more than one page that isn’t a part of masterpage type content. Example: If your application displays product information on 10 pages, it’s best to have a user control that is used on 10 pages rather than cut’n’pasting the display code 10 times.
• Put as little business logic in the code behind as possible. The code behind should defer to your business layer to perform the work that isn’t directly related to putting things on the page and sending data back and forth from the business layer.
• Do not reinvent the wheel. A lot of sloppy codebehinds that I’ve seen are made up of code that is doing things that the framework already provides.
• In general, avoid script blocks in the html.
• Do not have one page do too many things. Something I have seen time and time again is a page that say has add and edit modes. That’s fine. However if you have many sub modes to add and edit, you are better off having multiple pages for each sub mode with reuse through user controls. You really need to avoid going a bunch of nested IFs to determine what your user is trying to do and then showing the correct things depending on that. Things get out of control quickly if your page has many possible states.
• Learn/Grok the page lifecycle and use it to your advantage. Many ugly codebehind pages that I’ve seen could be cleaner if the coder understood the page lifecycle better.