Shanku Niyogi in his blog mentioned that his team has recently completed planning for Beta 2 of ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. For the Beta 2 release, they will deliver a high quality release with a go live license to enable live deployments.

They are now focusing on finding and fixing bugs, raising security, performance, and scalability through targeted analysis and improvements. They have also decided to remove a small set of features, already available in Beta 1, from ASP.NET 2.0.

Read more at http://weblogs.asp.net/shankun/archive/2004/08/16/215487.aspx