Chapter 2. Tools and Architecture | A First Look at ASP. NET v. 2.0 2003

In the previous chapter we gave a brief outline of some of the new and exciting features in ASP.NET 2.0, and now it's time to dig into them a bit deeper. In this chapter we're going to look at how development has been eased in two main areas. The first is the design time experience. With ASP.NET 1.x you had the choice of Visual Studio .NET or Web Matrix for development. With ASP.NET 2.0 this is still the case, but Visual Studio .NET "Whidbey" ("Whidbey" is the code name for the .NET Framework 2.0) is greatly improved for ASP.NET developers.

The second main area we'll cover is compilation. It may not seem like much of a burden in the current release, especially when using Visual Studio .NET, but there are several ways in which compilation has been improved, including a better model for code separation, centralized code directories with automatic compilation, and pre-compilation of sites to improve speed and deployment.