Newcomer to .NET, will I cope?

Hello,

I'm starting a new web development role and as part of that am going to be using .NET technologies.

My company are very generously sending me on an MCTS course (Technology Specialist: .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications) to get me up to speed.

I'm slightly concerned that I'm going to be out of my depth on the course as I have no previous .NET experience. I have several years Web development experience, mostly in open source LAMP and JSP environments. I'm well versed in JavaScript and did done some classic ASP with VB at college.

What does anyone think about me keeping up?

Many thanks

You should already know an adequate amount of HTML. If you are going to be doing VB.NET, your VB background will help. However a MCTS course is possibly a bit deep and possibly not the best use of the company money at a typical ￡3000/week. A better idea is to start with the training videos on the ASP.NET site. If they are not enough, get membership at www.learnvisualstudio.net.

It helps tremendously if you can get multiple monitors as you play the video or look at a book on one monitor, while writing code on another. In this case, a matrox triple-head is called for and what does in cost? about ￡200 for the triple-head and ￡150/extra flat screen so a total of ￡500. Very good value!

You'll be fine :) I was a J2EE developer as well.

The concept is a bit different from J2EE, but once you get the idea that it's based on page controller, meaning the postback model, you'll be fine. Other than that, it's all about learning the build-in controls like Grid, DropDownLists, etc and what types of events gets fired by each control, etc.

Good luck.

Thank you. Could you advise on any reading?

Hi Boomfelled,

Welcome to ASP.NET !

In J2EE and LAMP is a complex technology, takes more time to develop a website/project. In ASP.NET, we have a lots of control readily available. So know about the control and use it. It is a rapid development technology.

You can use:

http://codeproject.com for sample small projects, tips and techniques.

www.w3schools.com/aspnet/default.asp for best tutorial about ASP.NET (From begineers)

www.asp.net/Tutorials/quickstart.aspx for best tutorial about ASP.NET

I personally find the example here on our asp.net site is a good start for newcomers,

http://www.asp.net/learn/dataaccess/default.aspx?tabid=63

Other sites that I often read are

http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/
http://www.ftponline.com/vsm/
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/

hope that helps and good luck

Here's another one, it's a very nicely done series of Webcasts by William Steele at Microsoft.

http://blogs.msdn.com/wsteele/archive/2007/01/29/asp-net-soup-to-nuts-webcast-links.aspx