VS.NET 2005 CTP & ASP.NET - Round 2

I started digging into ASP.NET 2.0 some more today, playing with the new security controls & data binding. I've very impressed in how both of these work, with the ability to "open" things up by providing your own providers & databinding against custom business objects.

I was able to throw together a very simplistic secured application using the security controls in a matter of minutes.  Sure, it didn't look pretty, but I was able to register, log in, change my password, and logout without writing more than 5 lines of code.  One word comes to my mind... "wow".  I wanted to dive in further, and see if I could create my own provider, but I decided against that for now because I wanted to get into the nitty gritty stuff.

So...I travelled along, following the Hands on Labs from PDC, and only got as far as databinding.  Again, one word comes to mind..."wow".  It was one thing seeing Scott give a demo on it, but was a completely different experience when actually creating data-bound pages with ease.  So far, I've only had a beef with the IDE when trying to bind against business logic layers that return something other than DataSet or DataTable (List<T> just doesn't like to show up in the Wizard).  But, after looking at the code to reference a business object, I was able to use a List<T> return type, and again...was thuroughly amazed.

After my rant from yesterday, I'm starting to get more used to the environment.  It still would be nice to go back to the traditional way if we wanted, but I can handle without it for now. So...I guess my next steps are to continue going through the Hands on Labs, and eventually create a working website that showcases everything I've learned.