Warning:  huge tech geek post ahead.

I had a chance to play with VS2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 over the last two days after getting the bits onto a VM.  This was my first time with hands-on experience and I have to say that I am *really* impressed with even the brief bits I have seen.  Some of my own personal highlights:

HTML View

My pages now load in HTML view rather than design view - I'm sure this is a setting I can change but I *much* prefer it this way - every time I've loaded a page in the 2003 IDE I've immediately switched to HTML view anyway.

Better Intellisense

They were not kidding about significantly better Intellisense - not only do I get it for the Page level declarations (*so* helpful!) but also when I just start typing in the code window (with the modifier I'm using highlighted).  E.g. "o" becomes "override".

But not for Javascript

Javascript Intellisense is not *that* much better.  Typing a function call now gives you a list of parameters, but that's the only improvement.  It's really not that much better than the somewhat disappointing jsEclipse...I am anxiously awaiting the day that good Intellisense can be built-in for Javascript objects and object-related declarations.

Exception handling

I like the way VS2005 handles exceptions; a window comes up informing you of the exception and tells you the message.  However, you are also given options to view the exception details in a watch window or to put all of the exception data into the clipboard for pasting somewhere else.  It's little touches like these that I especially like.

Finally new events where we need them the most

This is the *big* one for myself and Ryan, for certain, and I'm sure many other developers with similar issues - there are now *new events* in the Page lifecycle.  In particular, OnInitComplete and OnPreLoad are new events.  Thank goodness!!!  So many frustrations and issues when trying to access the page inbetween Init and Load might now be resolved!   They seem to have added several other timing-related events as well - I noticed OnPreInit and OnLoadComplete, for example.  I'm sure there are many other new events but I've only been working with it for about 2 hours!

Much easier data access...

I know many have beaten this to death already, but data access is a lot simpler from first glance.  It seems like almost everything is done declaratively now.  I was wondering how to utilize dynamic parameters but it seems that Microsoft has thought of that too. You can bind parameters through the querystring, the session, a form variable, various controls…anything you could imagine, almost...there are objects representing all of these (including ones for cookies and user profiles?)    Only thing I'm not sure about is making a customized parameter, but I will delve into that more later. 

...makes it easier to open a security hole?

The new data filtering is awesome, but I fear the sort of SQL injection attacks that could result from someone being lazy on this…while it makes getting and filtering data a lot easier, it seems to also make it a lot easier to leave your application open to a scripting attack.

Paging:

The built-in paging is pretty easy, but I was disappointed to find out that the SqlDataSource object only supports "UI-style" paging (bring back all your rows and throw out what you don't need), not the more efficient "only retrieve the rows you need" paging.  However, I was heartened to read in the Quickstart that the ObjectDataSource will allow for that custom filtering (which I'll have to further look into).

And speaking of the Quickstarts...

It would be awesome if the Quickstart tutorial installation process gave more valuable feedback than "Failed to configure IIS directory - please check the logs - rolling everything back".  ;)  I did end up fixing my problem but it was only through a google search and some IIS tinkering.  And how about making your pages so that they fit properly in a browser window?  I can't imagine how aggravating it must be for developers reading through the QuickStarts scrolling back and forth across text!  I mean, that can't be too hard, can it?  This kind of HTML layout has only been recommended, for what, the last decade?  =)

Overall, however, I am *really* excited about all the improvements that I've seen so far.  It certainly seems like a thorough upgrade and I'm definitely excited to start using it more often!