.NET beta 2 released

At the TechEd 2001 keynote speech Bill Gates announced the release of .NET beta 2, with the news that the final release of .NET will be this calendar year. Beta 2 will be handed out to all TechEd attendees on Wednesday, but in the meantime is available for download from Microsoft. System requirements are far more modest than the original requirements for the PDC bits: a 450MHz CPU, W2K, 192Mb RAM, a 800 x 600, 256 color screen and 3Gb HDD space in total. A CD would also be handy if you plan on installing from the disks. Beta 2 is significantly different from Beta 1. Many of the namespaces have changed, and even some basic naming conventions (For example, WinForms are now Windows Forms). Everything from the System.Data namespace, delegates, keywords, and the IDE itself have all changed in degrees ranging from wide ranging API changes to more innocuous changes such as the addition or removal of underscores in names. The beta 2 IDE is much improved, both in terms of usability and stability, and companies now create shipping applications (with a few limitations). Also announced at the keynote presentation was the availability of the UDDI developer tools, the Mobile Internet toolkit, and a peer-to-peer code snippet sharing service. Integrated within the IDE is a new peer-to-peer code snippet sharing service that allows a developer to enter a set of keywords in a dialog box and locate code snippets from other developer's machines. These code snippets can then be accessed across the 'net and pasted into the developers source code directly. It's essentially a Napster-style code sharing initiative.