Teaching myself a little ASP.NET over the weekend. Surprisingly vanilla ASP.NET seems to lack a lot of modern features found in other web frameworks. I ended up running into the ASP.NET MVC preview and installed that. So far I’m liking it. There are a few rough edges I need to sort out. I think I’m missing something because there has to be easier way to link up LINQ and web forms for CRUD operations. I really like the LINQ syntax, it’s so damn intuitive. Funny because it vaguely reminds me a lot of a quick Python framework I built around DBSlayer for my senior project. Of course I still had to write SQL to get that working.
I’m well on my way with a Hello World 2.0 (Blog). I feel lame writing a blog to learn the language, but it’s a well defined application and lets me focus on the code. 
While I’m finding the MVC framework to be a major bonus, there’s still a lot of auto-generated .NET boiler plate all over the place. Definitely not as lean as some other modern frameworks, but hey it’s ASP.
I think MVC Preview 2 was just released so there’s not a ton of information out there. Scott Hanselman has some really helpful screencasts. There’s also a helpful tutorial that got me started at ASPAlliance.
