The change boils down to this - the class you define in your separate code file is no longer merged as a partial class with the .aspx-generated class definition, but rather with another intermediate partial class generated for you that contains protected member variable declarations of server side controls. Interestingly, it's no longer code-beside (a term that Microsoft never endorsed anyway) but really code-up-to-the-left-and-adjacent-to :) Perhaps we should call it code-diagonal...

 

Syntactically, here's what the change looks like. In beta1 you created a partial class and referenced it in your Page directive like so:

 

<%@ Page compilewith="mypage.cs" classname="mypage" %>

 

where mypage.cs looks something like:

 

public partial class mypage

{

  //...

}

 

this changes in beta2 to the following:

 

<%@ Page inherits="mypage" codefile="mypage.cs" %>

 

where mypage.cs now looks something like:

 

public partial class mypage : System.Web.UI.Page

{

  //...

}

 

Yes, you read that right - the 'inherits' keyword is back, and you are back to authoring the base class for your .aspx-generated class definition again. The difference between this and 1.1 is that you no longer have to declare protected/public member variables whose names match the ids of the controls in the .aspx file. This is apparently done in another intermediate base class that is created as a partial class and combined with your partial class declaration to give you access to the controls in the same way you do in the beta 1 release.