Revisiting old code

I spend a little time this week updating my family web site. The most enjoyable part was working wish my old code which I hadn't touched for so long. It was my first work with Visual Studio 2005 and the new features that came with it.

I had originally used the Personal Web Site Starter Kit to make the site. I then started adding a bunch of stuff and trying out the new things in the 2005 edition. I remember I tried to use a lot of different things as I worked just to use them. Looking back a year later was interesting. Here are a few random observations from my initial use of the new 2005 features to today:

• It was the first time I saw some of the controls in use since I originally set them up. (Some of them are no longer in use either.) Overall, I'm still not a fan of most of them.
  
• Since it was a learning experience, I mixed connecting these data controls to DataSets and Objects and had forgotten that until I dug in this week. (I could not believe I had left it that way.)
• My use of generics was consistant at least.
  
• I remember I had spend a bit of time reading up on ArrayList verses List in the documentation. I have used List ever since.
• Initially, I didn't realize that I could make changes to the default Membership settings. I left a lot of it the way it was and finally put it the way it should have been to begin with this time around in just minutes.
• I love master pages and themes, but was a little afraid to do much with them in my initial work. I remember thinking I didn't really like the defaults look, but thought it would take too much effort to do something different. I really missed the boat on that one.