I've spent the last few days playing with ASP.NET 2.0 (beta 2) so that I can get a website up and running. In the past I have developed with Interdev and the original ASP.NET, so I was interested to see the improvements.

I decided to use the personal web site starter kit

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/vwd/starterkit/default.aspx

attempting to change as little as possible to get a basic website up and running. The first problem I had was getting the membership database up and running - by default it expects an instance of SQLExpress, and attempts to create a database in a local folder - this fails for security reasons.

Instead, I ran aspnet_regsql.exe - this populates a database of your choosing with necessary tables.

The next problems I had were with dasblog. The first one was easy to fix and is documented - cookieless="UseCookies" needed to be added to the <forms> element. I next had to add styleSheetTheme="" to the <pages> element - the default is white for the starter kit. Finally I had to disable the rolemanager - <roleManager enabled="false"/> - if I didn't do this the blog wasn't working correctly when I logged in. I think there may be a more elegant fix for this

My final problem is administering the users - when running locally I can use the Website Administration tool - but at the moment I'm having to use profiler and query analyser to modify the "live box"

The site is at http://www.noelwatson.com