SharePoint integrated with ASP.NET 2.0

One of the things we did with ASP.NET 2.0 was to work real close with the SharePoint and CMS teams within Microsoft to change much richer architectural and creator integration than we had with previous releases.

Specifically, we have tried to carry many of the basic architectural requirements and scenarios they and other portal / CMS had vendors at runtime ASP.NET 2.0 (eg Web Parts, providers of virtual path and compilation, site navigation, membership and role management, personalization, etc.). The SharePoint / WSS / CMS Teams are then building their new releases on top of these APIs in ASP.NET 2.0 - and have the Beta2 versions of these applications soon. This will enable developers. NET to learn and master a single core set of APIs and readily re-use this across any type of web applications that are building - if this is a SharePoint portal, a CMS application, or a completely custom ASP. NET Web.
A few of the many cool extensible scenarios this changes.

You can now build a network of party control that supports drag and drop user-personalization and adaptation and use within any vanilla ASP.NET 2.0 application or host within a SharePoint 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services ( WSS).
You can build a class library, control, or page using the composition, role, profile, or web browsing and re-use API through the implementation of both a custom ASP.NET and SharePoint / CMS site. SharePoint will ship with a bunch of SharePoint providers that plug-in using the standard ASP.NET 2.0 Provider API (eg a supplier of ships that integrates SharePoint SharePoint page and models from the list in 2.0 ASP.NET Site Navigation API). This means you get * much * more mileage with your code, and can re-use their knowledge of the API for more projects.
You can plug-in your own tradition suppliers to extend SharePoint and WSS results just like you would vanilla ASP.NET 2.0 sites. Because SharePoint uses the standard ASP.NET 2.0 APIs for things like Membership, this means you can now easily exchange the authentication mode and membership storage for SharePoint solutions (previous versions required Windows Credentials. In One post it was using the default ASP.NET Membership Provider to change Forms Authentication for a SharePoint site. What is cool is that you could actually plug-in *any* ASP.NET membership provider and have this scenario work. You can also now download the source-code to the built-in ASP.NET providers, customize them or write your own, and then add them to a SharePoint or WSS solution.
Best of all, it means that you can also start more projects using SharePoint or WSS (Note: Windows SharePoint Services is a free download and can be deployed free of charge with Windows Server), and quickly create a solution with rich document management and support for collaboration and integrated (including client Office tool support) - and then be able to customize and further improve the use of ASP.NET 2.0 and VS 2005 skills you already know.

We believe all of this consolidation will allow a handful of really cool scenarios for developers. NET in the future. It also helps to validate and drive requirements to API in ASP.NET to send y. NET Framework, and ensures that they provide all the hooks needed to build great feature rich applications on top of them (with the Office Division starting to build on top of the new ASP.NET 2.0 API for two years that really drove a lot of great improvements and enhancements to its extensibility and ability).