One of the things we did with ASP.NET 2.0 was to work very closely with the SharePoint and CMS teams within Microsoft to enable much richer architectural and developer integration than we had with previous releases. Specifically, we tried to drive many of the core architectural requirements and scenarios they and other portal/CMS vendors had into the ASP.NET 2.0 runtime (for example: web parts, virtual path providers and compilation, site navigation, membership and role management, personalization,...