With the release of Visual Studio.Net 2005 right around the corner,
I think it's about time to start a deep dig into ASP.Net 2.0 and C# 2.0.
The MSDN documentation is as good a starting point as any book, and it's free to boot! As my friend Dave likes to say, "You can't beat free!"
Here are some of the more interesting topics (a personal bookmark of sorts, I guess):
Perhaps the feature I'm most excited about, with regards to C# 2.0,
is generics. My goodness, this will save so much time, effort,
and silly code. I've been using various typed collection
generators so I'm happy to see this added to the framework. On
the ASP.Net front, I'm very excited about the provider model (and all
of the different built in components like membership and roles), Atlas,
and master pages.
A lot of stuff to digest, for sure. Now my only question is how long it will take before any of our
clients are even remotely interested in doing projects with .Net
2.0. Past experience tells me it'll be at least 2-3 years before
companies start to move over and some may never do so (Newegg is still
using ASP Classic; why change what's not broken?).
I keep telling myself that I'm going to start a small mini-project
in ASP.Net 2.0, but I'm just too turned off by the idea of mystery
feature cuts between beta/RTM and the final product. I've been in
a "wait and see" type of mode, but reading more about the framework
itself.
On a loosely related note, I found that Jason Gaylord
did a port of the very early .Net 2.0 starter kit photo gallery project to
.Net 1.1. I've been looking for a good .Net photo gallery app for
a while now, so I may take a look into this.