Learning ASP.Net 2 Part 1

I started this Blog so that I could document my experiences of Web Technology and how I have found using them etc. One of my keen areas of interest was going to be learning .Net 2. Sadly this has yet to happen as I have been busy with work and some old PHP stuff. However I have been given a project by my church to build them a new website that will allow an editor to maintain it but also to have an events calendar and to provide podcast feeds. I was thinking to either use an old basic CMS system I had made in PHP or to use a free open source CMS system. But after some thought I came to the conclusion that this would be a great project to learn .Net with. So this evening while the wife's away I started. Yesterday evening I messed around with some tutorial videos on .net and Ajax but tonight I started writing my own code. I won't bore you with all the details but tonight I got a rough db design together, made a basic page that currently lists the page table and allows you to sort these as well as feature paging. I also started the add/edit page and got it inserting data into the database. What I have noticed so far is how easy it is to use controls, tonight I have used grid view and form view and tailored them as needed. This makes such a change from PHP and ASP where everything is so manual and lengthy. I also got FCKeditor working in .Net and as a control in Visual Studio Express. This was easier than in ASP or PHP and having IntelliType while setting it up made a huge difference. One thing I didn't sort tonight was default values for my form inputs, this frustrated me as I could bind the fields to the db or have a value, sorting this will tomorrow night's first task. So far I'm liking .Net, C# is quite natural as I have used C++, Java and PHP in the past and Visual Studio Express is a great tool, so hopefully tomorrow things will go onwards and upwards :D.