ASP.NET Gets Major Improvements

ASP.NET is critical to developer adoption of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, and Web developers already using ASP.NET will find ASP.NET 2.0 to be a “no-brainer” upgrade, providing improved performance and manageability and substantially reducing the amount of custom code they must write. For developers using competing products or Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP), the new features may prove tempting enough to entice them to finally take the plunge and move to .NET.

In addition to including new features that reduce the amount of code developers must write, ASP.NET 2.0 includes features such as support for membership tracking and personalization that were once the exclusive domain of products such as Commerce Server and SharePoint Portal Server (SPS). These new features may make it harder for IT organizations to justify the other products.

Although a beta release is not yet available, attendees of Microsoft’s Oct. 2003 Professional Developers’ Conference received prerelease copies of ASP.NET 2.0, which, along with the next release of Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET), is code-named Whidbey.