I do think there's a misunderstanding by Lincoln of the magic ASP.net is doing behind the scenes here. It's understandable given his desktop VB background. I came at ASP.Net after doing plain old HTML form processing with Perl and CGI, so I knew there had to be something keeping state for me and rebuilding object trees server side and routing "events" via hidden form variables.

But it's definitely geared towards "application" style design rather than "website" design.

PS: The ASP.Net style design would have been to ditch the StartSearch.aspx page and just have a single Search.aspx page that only enables the results grid and does the DB work if there is content in the search textbox.