I'm working on this old internal Web Forms application that doesn't even implementing master pages. Instead, it just loads a User Control to serve as content. I'm sure this was a decent solution 15 years ago, but anyway.

I've admittedly been behind modern developments, but I'm playing catch up. I've not dived into .NET Core or MVC.NET yet and I'm sure that is the right path to walk going forward, but for this project rewriting is not an option (yet).

It didn't help that the app was written in a horrible way in a lot of places. So, I've slowly been introducing things like Bootstrap and responsive design, client side nice tot haves with jQuery and jQuery-UI, and so on.

I'm currently wondering if my current approach of introducing client-side rendering with AJAX calls and building up data client-side with jQuery is a decent one or should be avoided entirely.

I've started to use the User Control that is used for page content purely for content, that is HTML, CSS and JavaScript include for behaviour. Then from the JavaScript, I use jQuery AJAC to call a Web Forms page with a bunch of Web Methods (I have checked out Web API yet) for the backend database stuff and render that on the client.

It works well enough and it's fast as hell compared to the old stuff (unsurprisingly), but I'm not sure about it from a design standpoint. I'm sure MVC.NET would be cleaner, but I'm on a deadline here and the stuff needs to be finished ASAP (like already, sigh).

How horrible or acceptable is this approach and can something be improved in the way I have decided to do things?