Dumb and
Dumber In general I like to regale my readers with stories of my brave accomplishments, ideally embellished to make me look like a hero. 

But last night I was dealing with a problem that when I realized the solution, I knew I deserved a big red WTF on my forehead.

I was playing around with an Atlas UpdatePanel in a form on some existing code.  No matter what I tried, the site would perform what appeared to be a full post back.  I started cursing Atlas and it’s gee-whiz-bang-newfangled-broken UpdatePanel.

This morning, before work I thought I would take a quick look at the underlying code behind (not sure why I didn’t do this last night).  Right there in the submit button event handler was the following line of code (actually slightly modified for brevity).

Response.Redirect("/Here.aspx?msg=Thanks");

I had totally forgotten that there was a redirect in response to that button event!  So the UpdatePanel was working just fine.  The apparent post back was actually a redirect.

See, that’s the problem with software. It does exactly what you tell it to do. Even when you mean otherwise.