I spent this afternoon watching Scott Guthrie present ASP.NET and Visual Studio .NET Whidbey to a packed audience out at Microsoft UK's Campus at Thames Valley Park.   ASP.NET 2.0 does so much out of the box that it's almost threatening to a developer - It's been a long time since I was this scared about a technology!   See my complete notes of the presentation slides and demo here.

When's ASP.NET Whidbey going to be available?
The aim is to ship a Beta in June and for RTM in Q1 2005.   There will be a 'go live license' that will let people put Beta 2 into production, later this year.  The Beta in June will be a public beta and it will be possible to download ASP.NET and Visual Studio Whidbey.  The build that Scott demonstrated with was from last Monday when he said they achieved 'Code Complete.  So they are now in that long stabilisation phase. 

Cooler applications in less time (even for enterprise applications!)
The key message is that ASP.NET allows you to create cooler applications in a fraction of the time it takes today. This sounds very 'marketese', but based on what I saw demoed it's very true. The hardest thing is that there have been plenty of demos like this before - from FrontPage and Visual InterDev. It used to be the case that you'd walk away saying 'good demo, but it will never work on a serious enterprise site'. But this time they've got the architecture right. Databinding to plain objects makes it possible to do proper 3-tier development. The Provider model means that there are interfaces at nearly every level that you can implement or override (apparently they'll ship the source code to the existing providers to make this easier).

It will be interesting to see how ASP.NET 2.0 works in real world situations.  Many of the features demonstrated like the login and authorisation and the paging and sorting of data are things that I've developed in the past so I know that they can literally take weeks to develop.  Now they are simple drop-and-drag and configure scenarios.  Also, since many of these ideas, like the data grid are now on their third or fourth iteration (I remember Visual InterDev 6.0 and it's 1.0 style implementation - urgh!) they have had time to develop to the point where they (look like) they are really going to work in the wild.

What a demo!
Out of the box Scott built a site with full security (login control, password reset and email page), customisable content using Web Parts, master-detail data pages (with paging and sorting enabled with simple checkboxes) using data binding in both 2 tier (direct to the db) or 3 tier scenarios (just plain public methods returning IEnumerable - no need for an interface or attributes!), easy internationalisation, support for navigation files (including treeviews and bread crumb trails) and Master Pages with Skins for easy site-wide look and feel manipulation. It truly does raise the bar about what will be expected as minimum website functionality in future.

The Full Notes
To save clogging up the aggregators and my front page, I've put my 3,500 word 'summary' of the slides and presentations here.

In summary I'd say that Scott is a great presenter.  He did a morning session on the basics, then the session I attended.  He spoke from 2pm to past 5pm and hung around until we were thrown out of the building to ensure that everyone's questions were answered.  It's obvious that he's pumped about the product and the platform that he's been instrumental in creating for developing web applications.