Compelling Reasons to Migrate from ASP.NET 2.0 to ASP.NET 3.5

Question

Forgive me if this is a repeat question. I've searched StackOverflow and did not find the answer to my question, so here goes.

We currently have a web application running ASP.NET 2.0 with AJAX Extensions 1.0 and SQL Server 2005 running, is deployed on IIS 6 and developing in VS2005. All works great, but I'm trying to find compelling reasons to migrate. The clients we serve to do not permit plugins in general in browsers, so Silverlight is not a reason for us to migrate. Also, we don't have any plans to migrate to SQL Server 2008 any time soon and ASP.NET MVC is not in the works either.

Here's my reasons to migrate. I would like people to comment on them or add to the list:

• I want to work with the newer .NET stuff (and I think other developers would too. Also appealing to prospective employees)
• Want to keep the technology up to date.
• Extension methods
• PageMethods in WebControls
• WCF
• LINQ maybe (we currently use AutoSproc for our DAL)
• ASP.NET AJAX built-in to ASP.NET 3.5 (not really a big deal though)
• VS.NET 2008 JavaScript Intellisense

Answer 1

My favorite parts are:

• Lambda expressions
• Functions available in the System.Data.Linq namespace: Where(...), OrderBy(...), ForEach(...)
• Extension methods (add a "ToDelimitedString(...)" to all IEnumerable!)
• Visual Studio 2008 is nicer with HTML/web syntax and debugging, including the aforementioned Javascript intellisense and debugging.

Each of these allow you to write code in a more productive manner.
It largely eliminates the boilerplate "foreach", "if x != null", and other boring constructs.