TechEd 2004: Yes, I believe we found Whidbey

Well Big Steve did not disappoint, no t-shirts with stupid catch phrases for us. We got colored baseballs. That’s right sporting equipment for a not so sporty crowd. No big deal they did have a pre Beta release of Visual Studio 2005 available. For those who are into this type of stuff that’s pretty cool. The most important thing to me, about this, is the ability to develop websites using ASP .NET 2.0. Basically it comes with a lot of out of the box functionality that developers are building on their own.

One example is instead of building your custom page frame solution (headers and footers) ASP .NET 2.0 comes with something called master pages. This, at first glance, is a more robust alternative to the traditional includes files. It also comes with built in common navigation tools and user authentication tools. These are extended from the 1.x versions. I’m going to kick it around and try to become familiar with it. The final release isn’t scheduled until next summer. Oh that anticipation.

You can read about all of this at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/06/default.aspx

For any ASP .NET developers it is a really good read.