Jeffrey McManus

I’ve been on stage at a conference in which a member of the audience weblogged my talk in real time. So I figure that liberates me to do the same with the talk I’m in right now. The talk is Scott Guthrie’s introduction to ASP.NET 2.0 at the ASP Connections conference in Palm Springs. These are rough notes for now; I’ll clean ‘em up later. I would assume that more cogent stuff will start emerging in two weeks when Microsoft rolls this stuff out for real at the PDC.

Update: Here’s a post on Scott’s weblog that contains his demo script.

Updated Update: Scott added screen shots from his demo to his weblog.

New stuff in ASP.NET 2.0:
Design goals: reduce amount of ASP.NET code you write today by 70%
40 new controls
User identity, personalization and roles
+ Can integrate with personalization system you already have
+ Everything is pluggable
“Master pages” (templates)
Collapsable tags
Customizable code generation
XHTML by default
Intellisense everywhere
- In directives (@Page, etc.)
- For HTML
- For CSS
- Etc.
Section 508 accessibility compliance checker
CSS-P support
Frontpage server extensions no longer required (can deploy via FTP, file system, or FPSE)
Better support for multi-tool editing support (create page in Dreamweaver, drop into Visual Studio)
- Wire-up less brittle
- Code-behind wireup cleaner (uses ‘partial types’ for better OO)
- Full intellisense and debugging support for single-files (no code-behind)
Built-in ASP.NET Web server (no IIS required)
- Only permits requests from localhost
- Can run under XP home
- Automatically shuts down when you shut down VS
GUI data access designer
- Two or three tier
Declarative data access
-
New data bound controls
- Gridview, treeview controls
Simpler syntax for data binding
- No more DataBinder.Eval.
- Now: Bind(“Address”)
- Binding is two-way (setting values as well as reading)
Declarative way to store connection strings in web.config
- Optional encrypting of values

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