And on your point of “you’re doing it wrong” by setting the visibility, your blanket statement is not accurate. If the div contains ASP.NET validation controls, you need to set the visible property on the div. If you just change the display style, you’ll end up with a validation control hidden but preventing (possibly) the page from being posted. That’s a very bad and confusing thing.

Honestly, I like ASP.NET a lot. The basic templating system, that lets you manipulate the ASP.NET document at the DOM level is fantastic.

The Web Controls, however, are retarded. They make ASP.NET seem like an advanced incarnation of 1990’s web construction rather than the kind of modern framework application that good programmers are building in Ruby, PHP, Java and other languages — it’s like they’re trying to compete with Cold Fusion, not the living languages that people are using now.

I ‘d love to have something that works like Web Controls, but the viewstate concept just isn’t compatible with the modern approach that people call MVC: real internet applications need the ability to display different ‘views’ based on form input and database results — to carry information through a series of related forms. Viewstate is completely incompatible with that, not to mind the browser back button. Reliable applications keep ~most~ form state in hidden variables, or implement something that has the same semantics: there’s a very limited amount of stuff that you can keep in session scope if you want to make apps that really work.

Perhaps Microsoft’s MVC framework for ASP.NET will improve the situation, or perhaps somebody will make something that looks a lot like the web controls but that actually works.