What's new in the Visual Web Developer in Beta 2

What we have been doing for almost a year? What is new besides bug fixes?

We had big security push and I believe it paid off. Beta 2 is much more secure product.

We did tons of performance work. The application starts faster, opens Web sites faster, switches views faster. Many enterprise scenarios have been improved. We mostly have been running performance scenario on low end machines (as in PIII 600MHz, 128MB RAM). Therefore, as you can expect, most scenarios ended up being I/O bound vs. CPU bound. We are planning to pay more attention to higher end machines between Beta 2 and RTM so we can fix any CPU bound bottlenecks.

In the editor space we have full support for classic ASP back in black (or back in yellow, if you wish :-)), custom coloring of tag names, full support for refactoring and code snippets. You can now switch off automatic addition of ID attribute. HTML outlining and collapsible regions are now fully implemented. Import/Export settings is supported. Source code formatting preservation was further improved. Accessibility checker works better with ASP.NET controls.

Some amount of time was spent on incorporating changes in .NET Framework, changes and feature cuts in ASP.NET runtime, changes in VS IDE, incorporating new 24 bit icons and other UI elements. We now have more and better starter kits and better intergation with SourceSafe and FrontPage source code control.

Hopefully Brad will blog more about changes in Web site handling functionality since his team owns Web project, references, Web publishing, debugging and other interesting and important features in the VWD.