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

newcomer help

I'm working on a project in ASP.NET with a lot of VB behind it. When itis finished, we would like to be able to sell the product to othercompanies but we do not want all of our code visible for them to modifyor use for their own. Therefore, is there some way I can compile any ofif into a DLL or EXE or something like that? I'm not exactly sure howto do it or what my options are, but it needs to:
- Still be completely functional with database querying
- Fully working with no loss of functionality

Also, if this is possible, will I have to still have the source codewith it? Any help in protecting this for me would be most appreciated.
Thanks,
Andrew

With ASP.NET you don't have to deploy the code on the web server. Only the dlls inside the bin folder is required.

Thank you for your reply... the only problem is, I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.
I truly am a newcomer with this and I pretty much need to be babied through it.
putting your codebehind files on the server will work - they will be compiled when you request the asp.net page.
If you want to protect your code, then the best thing to do is to compile them (into a DLL)
If you use Visial Studio, when you run your application, VS.NET willmake your codebehind pages into a DLL and place it in the BIN folder atthe root of your application foler.
To move it to a production server, you copy the BIN folder and your ASPX pages and plonk them on the server.
Job done.
If you are hand coding the pages, then you'll need to use the command line and compile them before placing them on the server.
e.g
on the command line you'd do this to compile:
C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\WebApplication>csc.exe /nologo /target:library /out:bin/Webapplication.dll *.cs
have a look at the article
http://www.thecodeproject.com/aspnet/devaspoutvs.asp
hope it helps you out a little.

also visit this thread --> http://forums.asp.net/974687/ShowPost.aspx