Whew! I’ve completed a draft of the slides and demos that go with my ASP.NET 2.0 course, and I just put the finishing touches on the first of nine labs and turned it over to my reviewers. I’m exhausted, but now’s no time to think about burn-out because there’s lots of work left to do–and a short time left to do it.
People that know me know that I’ve never been a fan of Visual Studio .NET. IMHO, in its current form it’s a poor tool for doing Web design. Let me say for the record that Visual Studio 2005 cures all of 2003’s ills and then some, in part because Scott Guthrie, father of ASP.NET, is overseeing the Web part of the product. VS 2005 rocks as an ASP.NET design tool. It’s really cool that you can create file-system-based Web sites and run them in VS without creating IIS vroots. You can even run them without having IIS installed. That alone is going to make classes easier to teach because it’ll eliminate the installation hassles endemic to ASP.NET 1.x labs.
The folks in Redmond deserve a huge pat on the back for doing it right. More to come…