I found the recent article “What's Ailing ASP.NET WEB Forms” by Rick Strahl to be very interesting. I still agree that the ASP.NET server side has a strong advantage over alternate technologies, but the client needs to be richer. Web Forms are too simple and people are not ready to fully except Silverlight (and the control set is not there yet). Integrating a client side framework like ExtJS seems like the best approach... for now.