I currently work as a web developer at my university's student union and have been here for a couple of years now. I have a pretty good understanding of their stack & way of doing things aside from the actual sysadmin / server configuration stuff - all the sites are written in ASP .NET with most of them being Web Forms (unfortunately). I've written & worked on many of these Web Forms applications, and most of them have the same issues: large, messy, and confusing .aspx.cs files, a lack of code reusability, and an overall difficult time fixing applications that are broken.

For my next project, my manager will be letting me try out React to see how it works with the current tech stack and if it will be feasible for other projects. I've used React with WebAPI before, but I'm not exactly sure how it will work with the Web Forms master pages & IIS server that all the applications are hosted on.

Does anyone have experience introducing WebAPI + SPAs on a mainly Web Forms (or MVC) codebase? I would like to keep the Master Page if possible, but I don't really see this being possible. Any help or tips would really be appreciated!