HOLY **** YES @ the event handling sucking massive balls. How can it be so hard to find out what the index of the row the user clicked on is? Really? Really? You think that'd have its own function or something, seeing as that's THE FREAKING POINT OF A GRIDVIEW. Never heard of MVC.
Practically speaking, C#/ASP still seems to be shooting itself in the foot. First of all, when you 'build' a project it's not actually making any executable code at all. No, it's making some weird in-between code in MASSIVE .designer files that are incredibly temperamental and seem to be ridiculously useless on the whole. It seems to be incapable of functioning without ridiculous amounts of back-generated code just to recognize its own variables that only C# finds to be relevant. Why not just make it more robust and have it understand the uses of those variables/class definitions in the compiler? Then when you actually compile/run the code in a browser you realize that it's basically just a crapton of slow-ass javascript functions. So why didn't I just write this in javascript and actually optimize it? I understand it's actually just talking to the server with ajax, but you have to admit it's pretty dumb slow.
As a PHP user, I think in terms of "I need to make a database query" so I make a "mysql_connect()" call and set it to a global var that gets included on every page. In C# you have to have the <asp:DataSource> tag with a ton of garbage in it or have the code-behind make an instantiation on Page_Load which only adds to the complexity and non-readability. What if I want to alter the SQL query? "lololol" All just so you can make tons of inbetween-code. That still doesn't even include all of the right-clicking through context menus to make sure that Visual Studio gets a chance recognize and rename a table that I've added to the DBML from a database it's already connected to. WTF how is that software development? Feels more like monkey work.
MVC may be different but whatever the **** I was doing was just wrong on so many levels. I can't go into details, but this is generally what the situation was at the company I was working for.
Every once in a while we would get a PHP project because me and my buddy were the only 2 people in the entire company that knew PHP and they knew we were good and could work well together. The vast quantities or other projects were C#/ASP.
Very first thing I get assigned when I started working was a PHP project that literally no one else in the company could do, I did it in 1 month completely and utterly alone. The company got its money.
I jump around from C# projects to one another, all of which had been around for literally months with tons of workers on them. Another PHP project rolls through, my buddy and I finish it in 1 month and the company gets paid. Meanwhile, the tons of C# projects were all completely stuck in the mud and were largely unchanged by the time we went back to working on them. No ETAs on completion, just slinking along. It was just impossible to make any progress.
This is probably an isolated case, but that's my experience with the two languages. I'm definitely biased towards PHP because I happen to hate MS, but I really had a hard time understanding any design choices they made in the way C# worked as a web development language. Outside of web apps, I have no idea. It really just made life hell. I wasn't purposely hating on C# either, my manager was always on my ass about deadlines and crap so I really really had to put in the effort to get good with it, it was just so unintuitive to me that I've been led to my current opinion.
Again, if you understand it and are very good with it then by all means continue your badassery. I just personally hate it. Don't let my opinions make you enjoy it any less.