Additional Features of ASP.NET 3.5 and 3.5 SP1

• New Developer Infrastructures

§ Membership and Role Management

§ Personalization

§ The ASP.NET Portal Framework

§ Site Navigation

• The ASP.NET Compilation System
• Health Monitoring for your ASP.NET Applications
• Reading and Writing Configuration Settings
• Localization
• Expanding on the Page Framework

§ Master Pages

§ Themes

• Objects for Accessing Data

Goals of ASP.NET 3.5

ASP.NET 3.5 is another mojor release of the product and build on the core .NET Framework 2.0 with additional classes and compatibilities. This release of the framework was code –named Orcas internally at Microsoft. You might hear other refer to ASP.NET as ASP.NET Orcas. ASP.NET3.5 continues on a path to make ASP.NET developers the most productive developers in the web-space.

Since the release of ASP.NET2.0 by Microsoft team has focused its goals on the developer productivity, administration and management as well as performance and scalability.

• Developer Productivity: Much of the ASP.NET 3.5 focuses on productivity. Huge productivity gains were made with the release of ASP.NET 1.x. One goal the development team had for ASP.NET was to eliminate much of the tedious coding that ASP.NET originally required to make common ASP.NET tasks easier.
• Performance and Scalability: one of the goals for ASP.NET that was set by Microsoft team was to provide the world’s fastest web application server. One of the most exiting performance capabilities is the cashing capabilities aimed at exploiting Microsoft’s SQL Server. ASP.NET 3.5 includes a feature called SQL cache invalidation. Before ASP.NET2.0, it was possible to cache the results that came from SQL Server and update the cache based on a time interval – e.g. every 15 seconds or so. This meant that the end user might see stale data if the result set changed sometime during that 15 second period. In some cases, this time interval result set is unacceptable. In ideal situation, the result set stored in the cache is destroyed if any underlying changes occurs in the source from which the result set is retrieved - in this case, SQL Server. With ASP.NET 3.5, you can make this happen with the use of SQL cache invalidation. ASP.NET 3.5 provides 64-bit support. Because ASP.NET 3.5 is fully backward compatible with ASP.NET 1.0,1.1 and 2.0 you can now take any former ASP.NET application, recompile the application on the .NET Framework 3.5, and run it on a 64-bit processor.