What are the secret productivity tips to be awesome at ASP.Net, Visual Studio 2008, and Sql Server 2005

Question

Recently I witnessed an acquaintance developing an ASP.Net site with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, and I was blown away by his level of productivity.

I mainly develop servers and sometimes Windows Forms applications. I only do a ASP.Net project every once in a while. So, when one comes up, there's usually a little bit of ramp up time to get my productivity back.

This guy, he was developing complicated .aspx and .ascx pages with seemingly little effort.

How can I become that guy? What are the secrets that I should know?

Answer 1

Experience is the best productivity boost I could ever hope for.

Answer 2

To me, "secret" is a word used to sell books more than anything else. Nothing is really a secret when it comes to software development techniques and patterns.

I think the key to being highly productive is to gain a very solid understanding of software development patterns, and to be reasonably proficient with your technology of choice.

Answer 3

There are no real secrets (well, aside from that one I won't tell you) but, basically, the trick is to use things that do your work for you.

• Unit testing
• ORMs
• Deployment tools
• Build tools

etc. There are many many others. But generally, try and avoid doing work, and focus only on actual 'application-specific' things.

At least that's what I do.

Answer 4

A note of advice: Asp.net has everything you need out of the box to develop small website. You will be able to do practically everything you want to do. Practically. And then you start hitting the virtual ceiling and it takes considerably longer to implement what you thought would be a simple change. Basicly, asp.net is a leaky abstraction (interesting article) when you start to do medium and larger websites.

Anyway, back to your actual question, to keep the productivity level high, avoid the AJAX.net stuff. Use jquery, dojo any other library instead.