Professional ASP.NET 2.0 provides a great overview of ASP.NET 2.0, even for someone with minimal ASP.NET programming experience. It is also reasonably well organized for a book written by five people. Here are some of the features I learned about:

• Encrypting Web.config sections (to hide connection strings, etc.)
• Easy support for user login and personalization
• Automatically building code in the App_Code directory
• Cross-page posting (supplies back-reference to previous Page object)
• Precompiling the Web application
• <asp:Literal Mode="Encode"> (for automatic HTML encoding)
• Focus method (sets the default focus for the Web page)
• AutoCompleteType (auto-complete support for edit boxes)
• OnClientClick event (easy support for client-side click handling)
• Lots of ways to do hyperlinks and/or images (Image, ImageButton, ImageMap, Hyperlink, etc.)
• Lots of ways to render simple lists (DropDownList, ListBox, BulletedList, etc.)
• <asp:Xml> (for easy XML transformation)
• Master pages (shared content for different pages on the same Web site)
• New binding syntax, including XPath binding
• HttpContext.Current.Items (for per-request storage)
• Using out-of-proc session state during development (to ensure that you can switch from in-proc if necessary)
• Post-cache substitution (minor additions to otherwise cached pages)
• WebPageTraceListener (sends normal trace messages through ASP.NET tracing)
• Debugger.Launch (to easily attach the debugger)
• System.Net.Mail (for easy e-mail support)
• RegisterClientScriptResource (for including .js files from an assembly)
• Adding information to Web service SOAP headers (e.g., user credentials)
• WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings (easy access to application settings)
• Class properties with public getter and more restricted setter