I'm happy to report that the 2005 beta 1 install went off without a hitch! I started off by creating a new web project to do a sort of "hello world" advanced version which involved me connecting a datagrid... excuse me... dataVIEW control to the authors table of the pubs database.

** Cool thing #1- when I created the connection using the smart tag (each control seems to have a smart tag menu that pops open to the side which lists common tasks) a message popped up that said "Hey, you created a new connection, you want to add this to the web.config?" Of course I do! It created the key (I notice it's not a general appsettings key anymore, it made a tag specific to connection strings) and linked up the connection to the key. Not exactly mind blowing, but it's one of many of the nice little touches I've seen so far.

Anyway back to the gridview. I grabbed a few columns from the authors table, it generated the column list automatically which I formatted using the "Edit Columns" item of the smart tag. Then I checked the allow sorting button on the smart tag and hit the debug key. Off to the races. First thing I noticed was the virtual web server popped up with a little notification in my tool bar (nice, no more IIS needed for my laptop) It actually loaded and ran the project surprisingly fast considering its a beta and my laptop is nice but by no means a beast (2.0ghz athlon xp, 512mb ram). All the sorting and display was good, and I didn't write a single line of code!

Ok that's not so impressive, I've seen the demo of that done before and I was just validating that it worked. I didn't have a lot of time so I quickly changed the state column to a template, opened the edit item, slapped a dropdownlist in there and bound it to a unique listing of the states in the authors table. Then I bound the text property to the state in the list and threw an edit button column on the grid. It worked like a charm! On edit the combo box bound and set itself to the current value and updated the database on apply. Not a single line of code...

I'm impressed. I'll post more when I get more deeply into whidbey. Probably won't be until later this week, I'm schedule to take the 306 exam (vb .net desktop) for my MCAD. I've finally decided to just go get certified just to put the letters on my card/resume. Hopefully I don't have too much trouble since I'm pretty much exclusively an asp.net guy!