I've been developing oracle database-heavy "web applications" forever by building my html by hand, adding some jquery to handle ajax requests (html inserts for forms processing etc), and always did my server side stuff in perl cgi. I really love how easy it is to read some form input, execute some select statements through dbi (SO EASY), and generate HTML to be inserted by the jquery request. That's a web application to me.

However, my new boss builds everything in visual studio 2010, vb.net, usually webforms. So, for work reasons, I now need to start developing in vb.net so it can be collectively maintained, and I'm just seeking advice on where to start learning/how to approach this.

I know I could at least learn ASP.net and VB.net, and create a webform, have it read parameters, return HTML, etc. which would allow me to use my previously written HTML and client-side scripts (jQuery).

Although- since we're moving heavily to mobile applications I really need to reduce client-side processing load. Is there any advantage to my boss' method?

Thanks a ton.