Over the past couple of weeks I've really started to dig into ASP.NET 2.0 (fianlly). Prior to this, I had skimmed through articles and books on ASP.NET 2.0, but hadn't spend more than an hour actually playing with Visual Studio 2005 or picking through the ASP.NET 2.0 classes with Reflector. In any event, the more I use 2.0 the more I appreciate its improvements over 1.x. The main improvements, IMO, are not the new classes/Web controls/ASP.NET 2.0 features themselves - virtually all of these could be done in ASP.NET 1.x with sufficient elbow grease. What's really got me excited is Visual Studio 2005. VS 2005 is what I've always wanted VS.NET to be:
- I have IntelliSense in Web.config, in the <script> blocks in an ASP.NET Web page, and even the page-level directives (i.e., <%@ Page ... %>)
- I don't need to have IIS on my machine to create and debug an ASP.NET Web application. There's no virtual directories being created when I create a new ASP.NET Web site through VS 2005; there's not a plethora of files that I didn't ask to be created.
- Switching between HTML view and Design view doesn't rearrange my markup. Also, through the HTML view I can click on an HTML element and have its properties loaded in the Properties pane.
- MasterPages/User Controls have rich design-time support, something that was sorely lacking in VS.NET. (Although one hiccup I found in Beta 1 is that MasterPages with CSS positioning don't necessarily provide a good WYSIWYG experience in the Designer. For example, a two-column CSS layout using the tecnique discussed here renders as expected in the browser, but in the Designer it lays out the left column above the right column, not side-by-side.)
Of course my experience with VS 2005 thus far has been with just small pages. I've yet to really put it through the test, so there may be some glaring issues with large pages. I should eventually find out, though, I have a couple of clients who (for some reason) are insistent on having large data entry pages with, at times, literally dozens of form fields on a single page... perhaps once they move to ASP.NET 2.0, though, they'll be excited about using the new wizard functionality.
Speaking of ASP.NET 2.0, you could probably guess that's what I've been working on as of late by a quick examination of the latest 4Guys articles. Last week's article was A Sneak Peak at Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0 and today's article is A Sneak Peak at MasterPages in ASP.NET 2.0. (These are another two exciting features in 2.0, albeit they are possible in 1.x. The DataSource controls discussed in the first article really speed up creating data-driven Web pages, while MasterPages (and their rich support in VS 2005) allow for easily defining a site-wide design template that can be applied to all pages and easily altered/changed on a whim.)