What's New in ASP.NET 3.5?

M icrosoft released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 in November 2007. I have good news and, depending on your perspective, I have either bad news or good news. If you were hoping ASP.NET 3.5 would be released with a variety of new controls, features, and architectural changes then I have bad news for you. If you're still trying to master all the controls, features, best practices, project structures, deployment options, and architectural changes introduced when ASP.NET went from version 1.1 to 2.0, I have good news for you. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of new things you will want to take advantage of in ASP.NET 3.5, but the changes from ASP.NET 2.0 to ASP.NET 3.5 are more additive and incremental than monumental.

Even if you are not ready to upgrade your existing ASP.NET 2.0 applications to ASP.NET 3.5, you will want to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 because of all its Web development-friendly new features, including full support for ASP.NET 2.0 development. Yes, you read that correctly; you can maintain and improve your ASP.NET 2.0 applications with Visual Studio 2008.

I'll describe the changes in ASP.NET 3.5 as one of two categories: ASP.NET 3.5 specific features (new controls, for example) and ASP.NET-related Visual Studio 2008 enhancements such as nested master page support.


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