As I write this column, the release candidates of the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 have just come out, and by the time you read this, they will both already be on the shelves. It feels like it's been a long time coming. I remember sitting in a room on the Microsoft campus in August of 2003 listening to Scott Guthrie and others (including my fellow columnist, Rob Howard) present the wide array of new features coming in ASP.NET 2.0. They astounded us with one demo after another of features that greatly simplified Web development, and did so in a pluggable and extensible fashion so that changes could be made at any level as needed during the development process.
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