ASP.NET 2.0

To be honest, I’m glad I’m not on an ASP.NET project right now. I saw ASP.NET 2.0 in action last Friday, and I would go crazy if I would have to do an ASP.NET 1.1 project now.
2.0 and the new Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) take a lot of ‘standard work’ out of the developers’ hands, making development much faster. It begins with something as simple as leaving the cursor where it is while switching between views. You’ve got button1 selected? Go to your HTML and the cursor is at the beginning of the button1 tag. In source view, select table3 and switch back to design view and, you guessed, table 3 is selected.

But there are some other great new features, controls etc.. For instance:

• Databinding on an object!
  When you write a DAL, you can bind directly to its functions from the new DataGrid, the DetailsView or any other data-aware control. (naming might be off)

• Standards compliant HTML
  You can select a standard for your HTML. The default is XHTML. This means all your controls spit out standard XHTML compliant code.

• User authentication and authorization
  ASP.NET 2.0 delivers a login control, a new user wizard, a password recovery wizard and more for you to use on webforms. And it automatically stores user data in a separate database!

• No more initialization code in your code behind files

• Declarative event wiring in C#

• IntelliSense everywhere (a Visual Studio feature)

• MasterPages
  You can define a master page that all you other pages inherit from. This gives you one place to edit the style of your page, which cascades down to all the other pages.

• Webparts

• Many, many, many more

Beta 2 of ASP.NET is scheduled to be shipped March thirty-first, so it will probably be downloadable the first or second week of March. The final release is planned for somewhere in August. I can’t wait…

• dotnet