For years the ASP.NET team has been out ahead of the WinForms team with innovating features that want to make you use their platform. They have pushed for features that support common development scenarios (Personalization, Membership, Profile,Site Navigation, Administrative Website, Master Pages and the list goes on and on) that developers encounter in many of the applications they write. WinForms did have some goodies... but definitely not at the same level, or maybe they just didn't market it like the ASP.NET team. When you talk about ASP.Net and luminaries at Microsoft, you think of people like Rob Howard (who left a while back to start his own company) and Scot Guthrie. These two guys promoted the heck out of ASP.Net and its capabilities when it arrived back in 2002. When you think of luminaries from Microsoft in the WinForms world... well... no one really comes to mind. Remember, I said Microsoft only... outside of Microsoft... Rocky Lhotka and Billy Hollis come to mind.
The ASP.Net team did it again in making it easier to get what you need to build your development environment for developing web applications. As I contemplated whether I was going to wipe my box tonight, I was searching around to see if anyone had a good method of automating the installation of all the development tools required to develop for the Microsoft web and desktop platforms. I stumbled across the Microsoft Web Platform Installer Beta...
Now if we could just get this through a MSDN subscription, so that we would have access to the actual versions of the tools rather than the Express versions.
