I’ve been digging deep in to ASP.NET 2.0 the last couple weeks and I have been pleasantly surprised by a number of nice changes that probably didn’t make the new features lists:

• Markup Designer Errors: When you have a problem in the markup of a page and it can’t show itself in the designer view, you get errors to follow up and fix (not the 1.1 version where it just complained about the first one).
• Localization Support: Wow!  You can tell VS.NET to build resource based localization and the resource files are strongly typed.
• IIS Support for web.config: IT support for modifying the web.config file in IIS is sweet.  The web-based one isn’t bad, but the IIS one rocks.

In addition, I was surprised by the intuitive forms authentication controls.  I was using the PasswordReminder control and wanted to capture the reminder and change the password to reset the password instead of remind them of their password since we were just storing the hashes.  But after digging in deep, I found out that since I setup the personalization to store as hashes, it was resetting the password.