I had been putting off the task of moving to Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 for some time. After looking forward to it for what seems like years (it really was years...) I couldn't bring myself to get started.

So many things have changed from VS2003, and I had developed some server controls of my own to work around various ASP.NET shortcomings, given up on Crystal Reports (wish I had a pound for every hour lost...), moved to Active Reports (www.datadynamics.com) and started using the excellent r.a.d. controls from Telerik (www.telerik.com), that I just knew the task would not be easy.

Anyway, I dived in ("dove in" if you are on the other side of the pond) last week and began by trying to convert a small ASP.NET 1.1 project that I started work on recently. The conversion wizard sounded like just the job. I copied the project to a new folder, opened it in VS2005 and allowed the wizard to do its stuff. The conversion report presented a fairly lengthy list of errors, warnings and comments. I started working my way through these, but after an hour or so it occurred to me that perhaps I was missing something.

I hunted through the MSDN and VS2005 documentation, but couldn't really find what I needed, so I ordered a couple of ASP.NET 2.0 books from Amazon for some bedtime reading.

I also discovered by chance that there was a Microsoft WebCast (http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/) yesterday evening on the subject of "Migrating Web Projects from ASP.NET 1.x to 2.0". This turned out to be very useful, addressing the various issues involved in conversion and - perhaps more importantly - discussing a new (old?) technology for VS2005 - WAP (Web Application Project) (beta version available at www.asp.net; see Scott Guthrie's blog for more information).

WAP, it turns out, is very like the VS2003 web project - rather than the default Web Site Project (WSP) model of VS2005, and may be a more suitable model for converting many existing VS2003 ASP.NET projects. Although only in beta at present, I understand that WAP will be included in a future release of VS2005. It may be worth a look if you are converting to ASP.NET 2.0.