I have been working with ASP.NET 2.0 for the past few weeks and it has been an incredible experience. There are just SO many great new things that it would be impossible to list them all. My personal favorites are master pages, ObjectDataSource, two-way databinding, and being able to register user controls globally in web.config.
Thanks to the .NET 2.0 Beta 2 Go-Live license we can now start deploying websites using it. If you are taking the wait and see approach on using .NET 2.0, I highly recommend that you reconsider. I believe that Microsoft has done such a great job with the beta 2 version that it is of much better quality than the original 1.0/1.1 final releases already.
P.S. If you need great .NET 2.0 website hosting then take a look at Server Intellect.
I am a huge Mike Gunderloy fan and so I pretty much buy every one of his books and read his Daily Grind blog posts religiously.
I just recently got my copy of Painless Project Management With Fogbugz and I really didn’t know much about FogBugz prior to reading this book. Once I started reading I was immediately intrigued by the way that FogBugz ties right into your mail server and treats each incoming email as a case within the system. You simply point it to any POP3 mailbox and when an email comes into that account it goes right into the system and you can assign a due date. You can reply directly to the message within the system and FogBugz keeps track of the entire thing. If the user that sent the message replies back, then that message is tracked in the original case as a threaded discussion. Amazing! If a user happens to submit a bug that you want to track, you can just edit the case and assign it to the correct project, mark it as a bug and that’s it. As I kept reading, I quickly realized that FogBugz could single-handedly manage my support requests, sales requests, bug tracking and project management for CodeSmith. I bought my copy about a week ago and I could not be more happy with my purchase! FogBugz 4.0 is truly an amazing product.
I just got my copy of “Visual Studio Hacks - Tips & Tools for Turbocharging the IDE” and I’ve managed to read through the first couple of chapters and skimmed through a lot of the others. The book is full of great tips for making Visual Studio .NET even better than it already is. I highly recommend getting a copy.
P.S. It also doesn’t hurt that Hack #50 is for using the CodeSmith custom tool to generate strongly typed collections. 