Preparing for ASP.NET 2

There has been a lot of buzz going on lately about the upcoming ASP.NET 2 release. Together with Visual Studio 2005 this will be a large milestone in the development of dynamic and database driven Web sites.

The betas of Visual Studio 2005 have made quite an impression so far. Both the Express versions as the full version of Visual Studio 2005 (available to MSDN subscribers only) have been around for some time. But what to do with them? It's fun to give the tool a little test drive, read about the new controls, master pages, the skins and themes engine, the cool membership and role management modules, personalization, better integration with Microsoft SQL Server and other cool new features.

But with the release date so far away ("somewhere" in 2005) is it any good to you?

Personally, I would answer "yes" to that question. The current (beta 1) release of ASP.NET does not have a "go live" license. That means you can only use it to test and develop new sites with, but it doesn't allow you to run ASP.NET 2 sites in a production environment.

However, the next beta will have this license, allowing you to run existing or new sites on the new .NET 2 framework.

To make sure you're prepared for that moment, now is the time to start learning about all the cool new stuff that will ship with ASP.NET 2 and Visual Studio.

Over the next few months I'll upgrade this site to ASP.NET 2. During this process, I'll write articles about my findings and progress. Right now, I have articles about the following topics in mind:

  • Master Pages - Creating a consistent look and feel
  • Membership and Role Management - Implementing the standard membership provider so new users can sign up to the site
  • Membership and Role Management - Implementing a custom provider so you can use the membership provider with a custom database or existing database tables
  • Themes and Skins - Although I am not much of a skin fanatic, I think this feature can be put to good use to offer users a different browsing experience. This may benefit vision impaired users, or users that just don't like my design or color scheme ;-)
  • Making use of new controls in ASP.NET 2 - For some of the new controls in ASP.NET 2, I built custom solutions which should be easily portable to the new framework.
  • Converting Server Controls. Some of the stuff you see on my site are, like the Voting Controls, are server controls. It'll be interesting to see how changes in ASP.NET 2 will affect those controls.
  • Deployment considerations - Easily deploying ASP.NET 2 applications.

In these articles, I'll focus on migrating or upgrading from ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2. I'll use my own site as an example, guiding you through the whole process and showing you how things are done.

Right now, these are just ideas. However, with the winter season coming up, I'll have enough time to turn these ideas into real articles, so stay tuned.

In the mean time, if you have other ideas for articles you'd like to see published on Imar.Spaanjaars.Com, or want to contribute an article to this site, feel free to contact me.

Have fun!!

Imar


Where to Next?

Wonder where to go next? You can post a comment on this article.

Doc ID 324
Full URL https://imar.spaanjaars.com/324/preparing-for-aspnet-2
Short cut https://imar.spaanjaars.com/324/
Written by Imar Spaanjaars
Date Posted 10/13/2004 23:35
Date Last Reviewed 05/24/2006 21:05
Listened to when writing So It Goes by The Verve (Track 4 from the album: A Northern Soul)

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