I just stumbled across a Donald Knuth wrote to the Patent Office. Interesting read.
This is just retarded. The best thing to do would be to leave the directory names as is - especially for the bin directory so that moving sites to Whidbey will be as painless and familiar as possible. This gratuitous name changing is retarded. Sure, it may seem innocuous all you have to do is hit F2 to rename the directory - what's the big deal? The big deal is that many people have written utility apps that assume assemblies are deployed in the bin directory. It's just nonsense. But even if you're dead set on making these changes, do we really need the Application_ prefix on all the directory names? No shit they're application directories! Did you think we'd confuse them with /Windows or /Program Files ??
Microsoft has decided to cut features from ASP.NET 2.0 that either didn't scale well, were unstable, or required significant changes to meet customer needs. Anyone in their right mind would prefer the folks in the big house to focus on quality over quantity, but it would be really great if the released the source code they've already got for these features and let the continue development of at least some of these features.