A quick summary of .NET Rocks' Scott Guthrie on ASP.NET 2.0

I just finished listening to .NET Rocks! interview to Scott Guthrie on Whidbey's ASP.NET 2.0, here follows a quick summary (probably full of mistakes and misunderstandings). To keep it short, I've concentrated in the what's not in the how's, why's, how far's or when's.

1. You will be able to drag a SQL Server table and drop it into a page, which will give you a data binded datagrid, mostly through property manipulation, the grid will be sortable, editable and updatable
2. One goal of ASP.NET 2.0 is to reduce the amount of code needed by 70-75%, Scott thinks Whidbey will get very close to that mark
3. Another goal is to simplify administration, ASP.NET 2.0 will offer a rich configuration API along with rich admin tools, in the bottom you will still have good old XML config files
4. We will get Intellisense in config files and in code embedded in web forms (as opposed to code-behind classes)
5. We will get some 40 new controls, including things like a rich treeview and security controls (authentication). Controls will work with both two-tier and three-tier data models.
6. Next releases of Commerce Server, Sharepoint Server and Content Management Server will use all these new facilities
7. We will have building blocks APIs services, like for example: membership services, role management and a personalization system
8. This APIs will use a provider model, so that you can create, for example, your own credentials provider and replace the one that's used out of the box by the authentication block (SQL Server tables, it seems)
9. The template columns design-time editor will get a major update, including two-way databinding and custom controls that can be dragged and dropped into the column (for example, drop-downs)
10. They're striving to have 100% backwards compatibility with ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1
11. ASP.NET 2.0 will be 64-bit enabled
12. It will support IIS 5.0 and up, Windows Server 2000 and up
13. In particular, IIS 6.0 will allow two use the ASP.NET authentication information to control access to classic ASP pages and even other resources like images or JSP pages
14. An administrator could be notified by e-mail every time a certain exception raises
15. Nothing to do with ASP.NET 2.0: in a few weeks a utility to convert classic ASP pages to ASP.NET will be available at www.asp.net
16. Enterprise Services will allow you to start/stop a transaction at any fixed point in your code, you will not be constrained to object boundaries
17. There will be a data access layer designer which will allow you to choose tables, views, add properties and then access all this elements in a strongly-typed way
18. Alternatively, you will be able to use Object Spaces, which is an object-relational mapping tool that will be released as part of Whidbey
19. Yukon and Whidbey have the same release timeframe
20. To create Yukon user-defined types you will be able to use any CLR value class (C# struct)
21. The Cache object will be enhanced so that you can, for example, make a dataset valid as long as the underlaying source (a table, usually) doesn't change.
22. Whidbey is currently in alpha, an early beta will be available (may be) in the spring of 2004
23. Check out for a special section on Whidbey that will appear at www.asp.net
24. All the stuff discussed in the interview, probably doesn't cover more than a 2% of all the new things in Whidbey

As I said, this list could have a number of mistakes and misundersanding so I urge to listen to the interview or, better yet, go to the PDC and get the early Whidbey bits.