ASP.NET web application - 5000 lines of code in 1 page - acceptable?

Question

I'm building an ASP .NET 2.0 (C#) based web application, which is primarily intended for intra-net use, i.e. to be used inside an organization's Local Area Network.

With respect to the User Interface, there are 2 approaches which I need to choose from.

1. Build a 1 page web app, with lots of ASP .NET AJAX 1.0 controls (modal popups) to show categorized content which would otherwise have gone into a separate .aspx page.

2. Use the traditional approach and build multiple pages.

The 1 page UI looks and feels very cool. However, I have doubts with respect to its scalability.

Agreed that the application is intended for use over a LAN, but since it is a web app, it could potentially be used from over the internet if the client wanted to.

Owing to the 1 page UI, there's already around 2600 lines of code in the single .aspx page and another 1600 lines of code in the code-behind (.aspx.cs)

This is going to grow - to at most - 10,000 lines of code (10,000 in .aspx and 10,000 in .aspx.cs). So I need to know - how much is too much for an ASP .NET based page - is 2600 + 1600 lines of code okay for Intranet AND Internet access? How about 10,000 lines of code? What is the bottle-neck? Is this single-page approach okay or do I need to fall back to the traditional multiple-page approach?

Answer 1

Before I say what I intend to say I would like to state that I do not think this is a good idea. Any class (ASP.NET) or not that is 5k or 10k lines long needs to be refactored. There are a lot of comments here that keep stating that your download times will be too long. Just because you have an .aspx file that has 5k lines of code embedded or 5k in a code behind file (or both) this doesn't mean that your download times will be significant just because of this. Those lines of code are compiled and executed on the server, they are not passed to the client. So there is not a direct relationship between # of lines of code to download size.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi

My Book: Inside the Microsoft Build Engine : Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build

Answer 2

Regardless of the increased download time for an incredibly bloated single page like that, it would be an absolute nightmare to maintain. I agree with Brad, the single page approach is not right. And I can't think of any way to justify 10k+ lines in a single codebehind.