And it was a valid Release Candidate, they could have gone live with it. A bigger strategic decision was made to take various concepts from it and apply them to .Net in general not just web specific things. At the same time it gave the ASP team more time to tidy things up and be more consistent in terms of new patterns in a few places.<p>Microsoft was open very quickly that they were making big changes and that RC1 was going to look very different from 1.0. There has been some chaos but it means we are all going to end up with a 1.0 release that is much better, rather than getting a breaking 2.0 release in short order afterwards.<p>It should never be assumed that a Release Candidate is going to make it into production, especially from an enterprise software vendor launching a new product. If the lasting legacy of this is more people taking that on board then that will be a good thing.