Starting out with ASP.NET 2.0

I created the Restaurant Thing site as a way to play with ASP.NET 1.0, and now that I have the development environment working, I'm starting on a new site to play with 2.0.

So far so good; the two things I spent the most time on when working on that site were the membership system (creating users, mailing them their passwords, and all that), and rolling my own templating system for the site layout.

ASP.NET 2.0 helps out in both these areas, so this looks like it should be a much simpler experience.  Or at least, it would be simpler if everything worked, and if I knew how everything worked.

One roadblock I ran into, and this looks like simply a beta bug, is when you use the ASP.NET Development Server to configure your site (something completely new to ASP.NET 2.0), it blows up when you try to set your SMTP server configuration.  You get an error like this:  "CS0246: The type or namespace name 'MailSettingsSection' could not be found".  Fortunately, I found a solution for this problem here.

ASP.NET 2.0 manages users and roles for you.  You can plug in providers for persisting the membership information so that you can use an existing user database or LDAP or something if you've got it; I'm hooking it up to an SQL Server database.  So far so good; the aspnet_regsql gives you a wizard that asks you where the server is and creates the database and the required tables for you.

So far so good... There's quite a lot of new stuff in 2.0, I guess we'll see if the time it takes to learn the new stuff pays for the time it saves on implementation.