Daniel Solin, faced with some limitations in ASP.NET 2.0 has blogged a criticism of the framework, stating that ".NET's attempt to standardize stuff like data handling is taken too far - control is taken away from the developer, and the only way to get it back is to digg deep, deep, deep into the .NET API."The entry starts by positioning Profiles, Themes, Masterpages, Membership as being very small improvements to the framework. While those improvements are nice, "the problems arise when you want to do a little more complex stuff than just pulling raw data from a database and present that exact data in a table."
Daniel was tried to create a UI for a booking system (see the image on the left) and found that the ASP.NET 2.0 way of using data bindings and the System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataGrid control didn't work. A large amount of "ugly and complex code" was required "that is hard to manage and understand."
Daniel concludes that "my feeling about ASP.NET 2.0 is that it's good for simple, common tasks. It makes trivial tasks even more trivial, but this at the cost of making the more complex (and more realistic) tasks even more complex."