Microsoft appears to be listening more to its customers, a shift in tone for the company that many applaud. On Friday, the first Avalon community technical preview (CTP) was made available for download on MSDN. The goal of the CTP process is to make customers extensions of the product team. Likewise, product changes have been made to ASP.NET 2.0 in response to community feedback. Signaling to some that the software giant is showing a willingness to work with those who use their products, a quality the company was in short supply of.

The company has had some success with its Visual Studio and SQL Server CTPs, whereby community feedback was beneficial. The company wants to extend this participation to core development component of Longhorn.

Concerning ASP .NET 2.0, it was announced in September that changes to a special private directory naming were made. After the user community began voicing concerns over the long directory names and change of the legacy bin directory to the new name of Application_Assemblies, Microsoft responded.

Two changes were made in ASP.NET 2.0. For one, version 2.0 will use "app_" as the prefix for ASP.NET special directories (rather than "Application_") and ASP.NET 2.0 will continue to use the bin directory for application assemblies.

Second, Microsoft is making changes to the compilation model in order to enable ASP.NET 1.x-like behavior where the .aspx file will now by default remain separate from the code-behind binary when pre-compiled.

Avalon, meanwhile, is scheduled for beta release in the first half of 2005. Broad availability of Windows "Longhorn" Client is expected in 2006. Plans are still being finalized around how and when the Windows Client operating system known as "Longhorn" will be delivered. The release features improvements aimed at improving user productivity and empowering developers' capabilities.

This attentiveness to users' needs is evident in ASP .NET 2.0. Microsoft made many of these changes to address areas that were of particular concern to its customers in the last version of ASP .NET. Furthermore, the software company wanted to make life easier for people by simplifying the upgrading of applications between ASP .NET 1.x and 2.0.

It is being reported that Microsoft is already beginning to see positive reactions from user communities. Changes in ASP .NET 2.0 are scheduled to be available in November 2004, when the next CTP ships.