In the four short years since it was first unveiled, ASP.NET has become the gold standard for Web applications run on servers powered by Windows®, adding runat="server" to the vocabularies of Web developers everywhere. It has also provided a revealing glimpse into the future of Web programming—a future that revolves around server-side controls that render HTML and script, and that fire events. In the next major release of the Microsoft® .NET Framework, ASP.NET 2.0 sheds its new-kid-on-the-block status and matures into a full-blown adult. Its aim is to reduce the amount of code required to accomplish common Web programming tasks by 70 percent or more. The goal is a lofty one, but also one that's achievable thanks to a diverse assortment of new services, controls, and features that promise to make ASP.NET 2.0 almost as dramatic an improvement to ASP.NET 1.x as ASP.NET 1.x was to ASP.