What do people think of ASP.NET 2.0?

[DimPrawn]

Anyone else here made the shift for VS.NET 2003 to 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0?

What are your thoughts? A step up or a buggy, retrograde step with appalling design decisions, ridiculous deployment and mostly pointless point and click controls?

[Flubster]

It's progress. But pointless.

Change technologies for something decent...and future-proof...

[HankWangford]

Anyone else here made the shift for VS.NET 2003 to 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0?

What are your thoughts? A step up or a buggy, retrograde step with appalling design decisions, ridiculous deployment and mostly pointless point and click controls?

In general I like it.

Good bits:
themes, adaptive rendering, master pages.
config enhancements (allowing better separation and less app restarts)
losing web projects

Bad:
Designer is still sh1te but who uses it anyway....
Hate the validator script file being rendered by resource handler, now unable to change it......very annoying since I spent ages on custom validation summaries in 1.1

Apart from that a few more events in the page lifecycle and not much has changed that I can see

[DimPrawn]

Deployment now sucks. So much so that MS are offering two addins, Web Deployment Projects and Web Application Projects.

.NET supports nested master pages but VS.NET does not (in design time). How pathetic. The VS.NET team should be stabbed.

A big push for ObjectDataSource controls for n-tier dev and yet this uses costly reflection on every call with no caching. Silly.

All the effort in VS.NET seems to be around "wow look at this no code" wizards and controls tempting people back into putting the SQL and DB access code into the ASP.NET pages.

Restrictive and childish App_Data, App_Code folders.

No default namespaces.

C# 2.0 is great and .NET framework 2.0 mostly good, but a lot of the ASP.NET "enhancements" and VS.NET 2005 "enhancements" plain suck for big sites.

That's my 2p worth anyway.

[hyperD]

I like the plethora of squiggly seagreen lines under most of my code words that keep telling me I'm obsolete.

Master pages are good for demos.

Visual Studio 2005 just about loads up within a minute on a dual core which is an improvement over 2003.

[AtW]

Had to use VS 2003 today and it seems very dull and crappy after VS 2005, particularly given improvements in Intellisense for C#, someone really did it for himself which shows in good product.

C# 2.0 and CLR in general are solid things, used ASP very little - intuitely disliked it all the time: SKA uses its own cross platform mini webserver with its own templating engine.

[_V_]

If VS.NET 2003 were a car it would look like this:



If VS.NET 2005 were a car it would look like this:



HTH

[AtW]

And Quick C/C++ IDE was like this:



Borland C++ 3.1 was much better.

[scotspine]

very 'black box' in too many areas. profile handling is appalling. sacrifices best practise on the alter of ease of use. library refactoring and enhancements seem ok. and again, it seems that you need to step outside the preferred ms way to get performant apps. incredible after .net 1 that web apps were not released with the initial release of vs 2005. it will be interesting to see the atlas/ajax library support in sp1.

[Joe Black]

my 2 euro cents...

DimPrawn:
"C# 2.0 is great and .NET framework 2.0 mostly good, but a lot of the ASP.NET "enhancements" and VS.NET 2005 "enhancements" plain suck for big sites." -agree. Like some of the IDE enhancements though.

AtW:
"C# 2.0 and CLR in general are solid things, used ASP very little - intuitely disliked it all the time" - agree. Always reminded me too much of 'webcontrols'. viewstate, postback etc, I've seen abused too often.

scotspine:
"it seems that you need to step outside the preferred ms way to get performant apps" - agree. While MS come up with some nifty stuff at times, the promoted world view (by other teams?) of how you're meant to do everything is sometimes to be ignored.

Conclusion, looks like my 2 cents weren't even needed...