plea for help: a newbie's tale

[briansmccabe]

Hello -

I work for a large corporation that has developed and maintained
several dozen web sites for various clients in the insurance industry.
My responsibilities involve the maintenance of all of these sites from
a content standpoint - performing updates, modifying existing code,
occasionally writing new code, etc. Almost 100% of our live sites are
written in classic ASP. We (finally) are in the midst of a transition
to .NET, and as such, we have a small amount of live content written in
..NET and several .NET projects on the table. After some hemming and
hawing, the decision was made to utilize C# in the .NET environment.

Here is my dilemma. I have a solid HTML background, and I have taken
the time to educate myself in the world of PHP to a decent level
primarily for fun. Because of my work as the content admin for these
sites, I have a cursory understanding of classic ASP. I have an
opportunity to really buckle down and learn a lot of stuff - and get
paid for it - but I am struggling to find a solid starting point. We
have VS 2005 (which I am not experienced at using), the .NET Framework
(which frankly I have very little understanding of what that even is)
and now the decision has been made to program upcoming "web app"
projects in C#.....

Is there an online resource that explains to an absolute beginner what
the .NET framwork *is*? I guess what I am driving at is that in
learning PHP, I found that it was lacking sophistication - in a *good*
way. I have a free text editor, I connect to a web server via FTP, I
code, it throws errors, I debug, it works, end of story. The sheer
vastness of Visual Studio, the .NET framework, all of these things that
need to be in place, etc etc etc - it's overwhelming. I am very
interested in viewing an online resource that sort of walks through the
ins and outs of a MS-based developer's world.

Any ideas?

Thanks so much -

Brian Mc

 

[OHM \( One Handed Man \)]

Where to start ?

OK, First of all you probably dont need to worry too much about the
framework other than to understand that it comprises of thousands of classes
grouped into something called namespaces. to use these classes you can write
a using statement at the top of your code or explicitly access the class
with its full address

ie
namespace.namespace.namepace.classname

In order to get going on VS2005 Web designer, you need to know some basics
about the language of choice, basic syntax. Having said that you would
probably be able to do a considerable amount with only a relatively small
understanding of the language.

Where your first major challenge is going to be is understanding the basic
building blocks which comprise an ASP.NET application and how this relates
to the rendered HTML/IIS/Security etc etc. One other tip would be to get a
very firm grip on the order that page events fire in as this will be crucial
to reducing the amount of time you waste trying to understand why your
application is not working.

My advice would be to book yourself onto a 3-5 day course to get a
kickstart and then do some serious reading before, after and during this
point in your learning curve while spending a huge amount of time trying to
make applications for real world applications rather than play with it.

Additionally, you would benefit from trying to help others on the newsgroups
as it drags you to areas you might not normally venture in to.


HTH

 

[Trevor Braun]

I'm not sure that I can offer a good starting point, other than to pick up a
book. Personally, I find the Apress/Wrox books the best bunch of books to
read without being bored to tears.

I hired a programmer to do some work for me recently and he had pretty much
the same background as you. He was very overwhelmed at the start, but
quickly saw how much the power of ASP.NET simplified life overall.
Unfortunately, there is simply no substitute for experience because the
transition from tradional "web design" to "web application" is huge. I
would never recommend that a company doing webites should switch to .NET
unless their websites are growing into more web application development.
And if that is the case with your company, then you will find the transition
to make a lot of sense, and while painful by times will simplify things over
the longer term.

To describe the .NET Framework in a single statement would be an immense
unjustice to the team that developed it, but I'll say this: picture it as a
massive library of cohesive functions that are designed to simplify your
programming life in every way imaginable.

I generally write Windows apps, but have recently been forced into some web
development. In doing so, I've seen how similar the two development types
have become. If your company is moving to .NET development, let me
recommend this: learn C# but don't stop there, you must read some books on
developing n-tier applications. One of the best, most flexible frameworks
you're likely to find are Rockford Lhotka's Business Objects (the framework
has many years of support behind it, and has just had a face lift for .NET
2.0, and is free/open source). There are two versions of his book which
describe the framework, and he is an excellent writer. The two books are
for C# and VB.NET; the only difference in the two are the language of the
example code.

If you learn just C# and put that to use you'll have gained very little on
the switch from classic ASP to ASP.NET. If you learn how to build and use
the various layers of the n-tier model, you'll gain the "ability" to build
some very impressive web applications.

I am an absolute .NET fanatic. When I used .NET 1.0/1.1, I really couldn't
see how Microsoft would simplify my life in the switch to 2.0; I was
absolutely blown away when I made the switch to .NET 2 and VS2005. Your
company has (IMO) made a very wise choice in making the switch to .NET
development. You'll open many more doors as many of your customers will
want to see better and better use of CRM and other "web-enablements" on
their websites.

For online resources there are a ton of them. The ones I use are:
msdn.microsoft.com - mostly for reference material, but there is a ton of
articles, how-to's and tutorials
www.codeproject.com - it is rare that there isn't an article here telling
you how to accomplish exactly what you're trying to accomplish!!
www.gotdotnet.com - excellent information and forums that are reviewed by
Microsoft staff and some of the best technical experts out there

I hope this helps you out. Enjoy .NET!!

Trevor B

 

[briansmccabe]

Thank you so much. I appreciate your feedback. I am actually attending
a weeklong course toward the end of May, so I will try and bone up
before then.

Thanks again!

 

[Guest]

Brian,
Surprisingly nobody mentioned the asp.net Quickstarts. They install with
both Visyal Studio.NET and the .NET Framework SDK, and online versions are
also available.

Best place to start.
Peter

 

[briansmccabe]

QuickStarts - these are tutorials of some sort?

Also I am curious if the free version of VS (I think it's called
Express) allows access to the framework. I actually was fortunate
enough to attend MIX '06 in Vegas last month so I have a complimentary
VS Standard license but I have more than one machine, so I thought
perhaps I would run the express on one. Is the framework itself free?
What is the difference between the MSDN Library and the Framework?

 

[nakedCode]

The MSDN Library is a source of information, documentation and loads of other
bells, whistles and trumbones.

The .Net Framewwork its self and indeed an sdk with a command line compiler
are free

If its webapps you plan to do, why not start reading here http://www.asp.net

 

[Usenet User]

Brian,

Your situation is not that great, and this is why:

ASP.NET is a fairly complex topic; much more sophisticated than
classic ASP. Even an experienced developer gets challenged and
overwhelmed by it, especially if he/she wants to do things the right
way.

What usually happens is that companies decide to move to ASP.NET
without having a slightest experience with the obvious prerequisite:
..NET and C# in general. As the result, the developers struggle right
from the start, because they never get the above prerequisite under
their belt. A persistent person would eventually succeed, of course,
but he would face a very difficult route. In majority of cases,
however, you'd get a half-breed "ASP.NET developers" who hack
bad-to-mediocre solutions and still get puzzled by trivial
..NET-related problems. This is very sad and annoying reality, I must
admit.

A much better way is to start with generic .NET programming and C# and
not move to ASP.NET at all, until you get really proficient and
understand the concept of .NET clearly. Unfortunately, not everyone
has a choice to go this way due to immediate business needs.

 

[Guest]

Some of the very first programs I wrote with the .NET Beta 1.0 Framwork CDs
from Tech-Ed Orlando in 2000 were web applications. I was a VB programmer and
C# was alien to me. But I was so motivated by what you could do with it that
I was hooked, and my skills got better and better, partly thanks to
constructive comments from gurus on these very forums.
Peter

--
Co-founder, Eggheadcafe.com developer portal:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com
UnBlog:
http://petesbloggerama.blogspot.com

 

[OHM \( One Handed Man \)]

Well said !

 

[Otis Mukinfus]

Hello -

I work for a large corporation that has developed and maintained
several dozen web sites for various clients in the insurance industry.
My responsibilities involve the maintenance of all of these sites from
a content standpoint - performing updates, modifying existing code,
occasionally writing new code, etc. Almost 100% of our live sites are
written in classic ASP. We (finally) are in the midst of a transition
to .NET, and as such, we have a small amount of live content written in
.NET and several .NET projects on the table. After some hemming and
hawing, the decision was made to utilize C# in the .NET environment.

Here is my dilemma. I have a solid HTML background, and I have taken
the time to educate myself in the world of PHP to a decent level
primarily for fun. Because of my work as the content admin for these
sites, I have a cursory understanding of classic ASP. I have an
opportunity to really buckle down and learn a lot of stuff - and get
paid for it - but I am struggling to find a solid starting point. We
have VS 2005 (which I am not experienced at using), the .NET Framework
(which frankly I have very little understanding of what that even is)
and now the decision has been made to program upcoming "web app"
projects in C#.....

Is there an online resource that explains to an absolute beginner what
the .NET framwork *is*? I guess what I am driving at is that in
learning PHP, I found that it was lacking sophistication - in a *good*
way. I have a free text editor, I connect to a web server via FTP, I
code, it throws errors, I debug, it works, end of story. The sheer
vastness of Visual Studio, the .NET framework, all of these things that
need to be in place, etc etc etc - it's overwhelming. I am very
interested in viewing an online resource that sort of walks through the
ins and outs of a MS-based developer's world.

Any ideas?

Thanks so much -

Brian Mc

One way to learn would be to purchase one of the Express editions of .NET and
get your feet wet at home. I believe the Express versions were created with
beginning programmers in mind. You can read about them at the URL below.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/jun04/06-29expressdebutpr.mspx

Good luck with your project,

Otis Mukinfus
http://www.arltex.com
http://www.tomchilders.com