Visual Studo 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 made it simple ... way too simple

I am so excited about Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 it is ridiculous.  I'm counting the days until the beta and we can get solid bits in the hands of everyone, because I want to see how all of you use it.  Let me tell you all a story --

I've been trying to play around with VS 2005 and tried to setup some scenarios for applications that I can build.  I stumbled across this site about people with my last name several years ago and it recently went through a redesign using PHP.  I chatted with the sites author and was curious to know about his decision making process for PHP.  He had some very valid reasons about availability of code, sample apps, etc.  He said it was just easy.  I commented to him that what took him several days to build could probably be done in an afternoon using our new stuff.  But I didn't really know.  So what did I do?  I built the sites functionality, added some admin stuff, and did it all in about half a day on Sunday.  And I did that with bits that weren't very stable.  How did I do it?  Really quite simple.

First -- I used a master page to define the sites look and feel (borrowed the HTML/CSS from the site)

Second -- I built a membership system using the ASP.NET Membership / Role Management application services, our login controls (login, addnewuser, password recovery, etc)

Third -- I dropped in the ASP.NET Forums as the BB system.

Fourth -- I used the site navigation system, tree view control for side navi, menu control for top nav.

Fifth -- I built some very simple search logic in a middle tier object, and wired it together using the objectdatasource

Sixth -- Since I had a login system, I was able to build the additions/update piece very easily by wiring up a datagrid the to the logged in user and turning on editing.

At this point I was at feature parity +...  The reality is, I could have probably built the thing in 2 hours, but had some bits issues :)... 

I was flat out impressed.  Hearing these things is great, but soon you can test them too... 

The fun part is, we are building some starter kits which will bake a lot of this functionality right in -- and it probably would have taken even less time and added more functionality -- think photo gallery, blog, etc.  I'm excited to get this stuff out to you so I can hear what trials, tribulations and successes you have.

Okay -- back to work :)