Applied ASP.NET 4 in Context

C H A P T E R  10

Adding Interactivity

The technologies that underpin a web application were not designed for stateful user interactions. The fact that we can build credible web applications at all is because of a lot of clever tricks and techniques built in to frameworks like ASP.NET. Web applications are like a magic trick; we form sessions from a series of stateless network requests, we hide essential information in the HTML we generate, and we express complex data relationships using simple markup.

By and large, everything works well enough to maintain the illusion, and we can make a fair stab at re-creating the experience of a traditional deployed application. But our weakest area—that which threatens to expose our web application as a ...