(.NET - ASP.NET) More and Less: How ASP.NET 2.0 Features Compare Against the Starter Kit Reference Applications

The ASP.NET Starter Kits are five sample ASP.NET applications that provide code to accomplish common Web development tasks. This article looks at how the new features in ASP.NET 2.0 could be used to simplify the Starter Kits

The ASP.NET Starter Kits are a collection of five sample applications that show Web developers how to take advantage of ASP.NET 1.x features. The Starter Kits include reference implementations for important features such as interactive HTML reports; skinning and themes; authentication and authorization; mobile Web browser support; and much more. An hour spent exploring the source code from a starter kit can save many hours of programming and debugging.

In ASP.NET 2.0, Microsoft has introduced a significant number of enhancements and new features to greatly improve developer productivity and dramatically reduce the lines of code that a Web developer must generate. A number of ASP.NET 2.0 features actually make several key features of the starter kits trivial to implement. This article introduces some of the most prominent new features in ASP.NET 2.0, and contrasts the simplicity of using the ASP.NET 2.0 features against the amount of code required to implement similar features in the ASP.NET Starter Kits.