Does developing in .aspx produce bloated code?

This started out as a comment in response to Robbie’s question on my previous post, but thought I’d turn it into another post:

So is it that they are written in aspx which makes them bloated?.

Well, I guess that’s what I’m kinda implying.

Building in the .NET framework with the Visual Studio IDE tends to mean that lots of components and snippets are provided for you. So by default you get things like having all your page content wrapped in a <form> element and you get the lovely __VIEWSTATE hidden input field and stuff like that.

I think that there can be a tendency amongst back-end developers, i.e. .NET, Java developers, to produce something that works well technically, and then take the PSDs that the designer gave them and put them on the front, so you’ve got something that looks like it’s supposed to, and works kinda like it’s supposed to, but with the interface between the front- and back-ends being very ugly, slow, and inefficient. Of course this has an often considerable negative effect for the end user.

While this may be a generalisation, I’ve experienced it first-hand, with developers who struggle to understand, or at least show some care, about good clean lightweight, semantic front-end code that performs well in the browser.
When you’re developing with .NET in an IDE like Visual Studio, you have to put in a bit more effort to get that good code.

Developing in .NET doesn’t necessarily produce bloated code, but I think if you took a look at the average .NET (.aspx) site, I think you’ll find greater code-bloat than in your average hand-crafted-in-TextMate code.