The Goals of ASP.NET 2.0

The Goals of ASP.NET 2.0
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They are
1. Developer productivity
2. Administration and management
3. Performance and scalability

Developer productivity: Much of the focus of the asp.net 2.0 is on productivity. It achieved it by introducing new controls like Gridview, detailsview, masterpages, sitenavigation and etc.

Administration and management: Asp.net 2.0 now includes a Microsoft Management Console(MMC) snap-in that enables web application administrators to edit configuration settings easily.
This allows system administrators to edit the contents of the machine.config and web.config files directly from the dialog instead of having them examine the contents of an xml file.
In addition to this dialog, web or system administrators have a web based way called web administration tool to administer their asp.net 2.0 applications.

Performance and scalability: One of the most exciting performance enhancements of asp.net 2.0 is its Caching capability. It includes a feature called SQL Cache invalidation.
Before asp.net 2.0 it was possible to cache the results from sql server and to update the cache based on a time interval- for ex. every 10 sec so on. This means that the end user might see stale data if the result set changed sometime during 10 sec period. but by using asp.net2.0 new feature sql cahe invalidation the output cache is triggred to change when the result set from sql server changes.
In addition to this asp.net 2.0 now provides 64 bit support.This means that now you can run your asp.net applications on a 64 bit Intel or AMD processors.