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ASP.NET 2.0 - My Opinion

Microsoft's new version of its dynamic web language is an advance to build powerful web-based applications. It adds some new controls and features which aides development and the speed of which to develop. Although these additions should have been already in place in .NET 1.0 and 1.1, all are now very welcome.

Having followed Microsoft's web development technologies since 2000, ASP.NET 2.0 is my preferred method of building web applications today - utalising Microsoft's core development tool, Visual Studio 2005 which also allows a visual aide to programming Visual Basic 8 and SQL Server 2005.

SOME New features

  • ' Master pages ' to create template-based websites;
  • New navigation controls;
  • New controls for the display and manipulation of data (see below);
  • Membership services;
  • New log-in controls;
  • Role management.

One of the new data controls is the ' GridView '. This drag-and-drop control has a wizard-based placement of data from a data source within a page with ease. Course, the wizard can always be turned off for more in-depth programming (which is often the case). This control - with minimal configuration - makes it possible for a visitor, when viewing data in a web page, to sort any column they so wish. That's great news for the user experience.

IMPROVEMENTS Mean more lines of code ?

Some improvements mean a detriment in other areas. For ASP.NET 2.0 this means that some new features - to ensure cross-platform/browser compatibility - generates more code on the visitor-end.

Having experienced this at first hand in my initial learning of .NET 2.0, the home page on this website contains around 20 lines of code when in development with Visual Studio, but when viewing the code/HTML source within a browser, the code has with near-400 lines of code.

AVAILABILITY OF THE VISUAL TOOLS

With .NET 2.0, Microsoft now provides different visual tools for development - some free! This new direction is miles away from the expensive Visual tools once available to develop .NET 1 and .NET 1.1 applications.

Today, to develop a web application using a visual tool, you can download - for free  :

  • Visual Web Developer (the web-development component of ' Visual Studio ');
  • SQL Server 2005 Express edition (a scaled-down version of Microsoft's enterprise 2005 database)

Having been one of the very first to use Visual Studio 2005 in the UK in late 2005, I use the ' Professional ' editions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 which together harnesses the full Windows system.

MORE DESIGNING/DEVELOPMENT TOOLS Around the corner

Microsoft is planning to release a new suite of products aimed at designing / developing web applications called ' Microsoft Expression '. I await these products with interest, though before they are released I continue to enjoy development/designing with Dreamweaver having used it extensively. It's going to be tough for Microsoft Expression to out-shine Dreamweaver for shear enjoyment in use.

To conclude, I like using .NET 2.0.