VS 2005 and Express Family

The Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 and the Express family are available now. There're lots of articles about Visual Studio, VB and C# 2005 on the Internet, and of course, including ASP.NET v2.0.

Being one of the author of Building Dynamic Web application in Web Matrix, my most favourite one is definitely the Visual WebDev (VWD) Express as it's a standalone IDE to developer ASP.NET v2.0 Web application!

There're lots of discussions about ASP.NET Web Matrix vNext on the forums, and I can't say VWD is a substitution / replacement / next version ... of the Web Matrix (Web Matrix is really a darn cool Win app in developing ASP.NET v1.* by the way and I'm still loving it), but VWD is really really nice. It not only contains all of the outstanding features of the Web Matrix, but it provides features like IntelliSense, debugging, handy (project-less) and familiar development environment for Web developers.

Apart from checking out the VWD forums on www.asp.net, take a look at the Personal Web Starter Kit and the video by Brian - Introducing VWD Express Edition on Channel9.