Microsoft would like to convince developers like me to check out ASP.NET 2.0. So they launched Microsoft® ASP.NET 2.0 Webcast Series, a set of webcasts sponsored by Microsoft, Dr. Dobb’s, and O’Reilly. They have 3 tracks; a .NET for JSP developers, .NET for PHP developers and .NET for Cold Fusion Developers.

By "developers like me" I mean people who aren't using .NET 1.x but are open-minded about it. Of course I have used .NET before. The admin and Flash remoting code for NRANews.com are in C# and I built an extranet site for Greyhound shipping in DotNetNuke, a VB.NET Portal/CMS. But I haven't used .NET for any real development for almost a year. I'm not biased against it, but most of my recent projects were better handled in Typo3 and PHP.

But anyway, I would still say I'm the target market for this site since I am very willing to leave PHP for a more robust or sophisticated environment. I routinely miss the more advanced features of Java or .NET while working in PHP, so here's MS's chance to get me to build my next project in .NET rather than Ruby on Rails or Django/Python or Java/Tapestry/JSF.

Ugh This paragraph used to be a rant about how lame it was that the webcasts were ony available live. But now I see that they ARE available on demand afterwards. The interface didn't really reflect that very well though, they just added links to the on-demand versions afterwards. I can still complain about the AI though! It was confusing! I swear!