I started working with Visual Studio 2005 Beta recently and much has changed. Technology is constantly evolving, and once we seem to get settled something new arrives and it is time to relearn new concepts. In this case, I have really only scratched the surface.

In my aspx pages, “asp” is an unrecognized tag prefix or device filter. In design mode, I am able to add web controls just fine, but when I manipulate them in source mode I am not getting any help from intellisense. Besides these errors, when I run the project it works fine. This is a pain because I do not have access to intellisense when creating my “asp” specific controls. Maybe it is just me or my environment, but hopefully this will be corrected in the alpha release.

In your aspx code behind, you may gain access to the Master page in two ways that I have found. The first is to include a MasterType directive below the Page directive like the following, "MasterType virtualpath="~/MasterPage.master."

The second method is to omit this MasterType directive and access it in the page’s code behind.

void Page_Init(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
     MasterPage_master mp = (MasterPage_master)this.Master;
     this.lblCompany.Text = mp.CompanyName;
}

Finally, for right now anyway, this is my first experience with partial classes. It is too early for me to formulate an opinion on if I do or do not like using partial classes. I can say using partial classes requires an understanding of ASP.NET 1.x. I would not want to be learning ASP.NET 2.0 without understanding 1.x. I can understand what the partial class is aiming to solve, but I am not sure if it is necessary.

When using partial classes, I now must override or implement basic webform events such as Page_Load or OnLoad when I need to modify logic in these cases. In ASP.NET 1.1, I have noticed when creating web controls in my page, they are not always provided in my code-behind, so I am forced to manually add them. With ASP.NET 2.0, the controls are not documented in the partial class. I do prefer seeing them, as well as seeing the generated code when the classes are created. I guess these are just part of the growing pains of moving from 1.1 to 2.0.