My Philosophy and Approach

• I hate high level abstraction. "Black Boxes" if you will. ATLAS is one, so is GWT. I don't want to program in binary, but I also don't want a miracle tier. It's important for me me to have (a) control and (b) understanding. Without those, an application quickly devolves into a mess filled with compromises and maintenance headaches. I'm all for frameworks, toolkits, and other RAD resources, but from there up, I want to roll my own.
• I'm a Microsoft guy, and I don't apologize for it. Microsoft has done a stellar job creating development tools. They are fans of the miracle tier, but I completely and fiercely ignore that stuff. (Microsoft has to appeal to the VB6/2-tier crowd, and I grumble and whine and swear it's a complete waste of time and resources, but it's their right. I understand it from a business standpoint.) The .NET framework is a thing of beauty. And Visual Studio is (finally) near perfect. I can't imagine a life without intellisense. Microsoft has created a powerful foundation. ASP.NET + SQL Server are my world. I love how they work and I've hitched my wagon to them.
  
• I'm a harsh Microsoft critic. It used to be they could do no wrong in my eyes, lately (last 2-3 years) they've disappointed me greatly and I'm not shy in talking about it. But, per my previous point, my criticisms come from a place of love. I want them to succeed, their success is mine.
• I'm a javascript noob. I resolved at the beginning of the year (2006) that I would learn it. I've been reading voraciously, applying, eating the learning curve and I'm now currently engaged in a large-ish project that heavily uses it (for me, nothing teaches like the need to do something real with it, now). I'm actually falling in love with javascript. Which is astounding to anyone who has heard me talk about javascript in years past. I hated it with such a festering passion that when I spoke of it, my wife wondered if I used that same mouth to kiss my mother.
• I spent a great deal of time evaluating different javascript frameworks. The frontrunners were (the horridly named) Prototype library and the Yahoo Interface Library (YUI). After fooling around with both, creating junk, reading documentation, reading community opinions, I landed on YUI for my current project. It's not quite as rich or mature as Prototype, but as a traditionalist OOP purist, and formally-trained programmer, its approach appeals to me. Plus it has the backing of Yahoo. Prototype has way more stuff and a much larger community, but it feels a bit too (wait for it) "black box" to me.
• I've brewed my own approach to AJAX that I'll share in another post, but in short: YUI Connection Manager -- post back -- page detects an AJAX request by looking at the querystring -- use normal framework mechanics to construct the HTML response -- spit it back -- Response.End -- innerHTML the response into the appropriate spot. 
• Yes it's possible to be a Microsoft guy, and a javascript/AJAX/Web2.0 guy. Get over it.