Getting quickly up to speed on ASP.NET for an experienced coder

Question

I have a contract in the offering from a client to develop an intranet application for capturing/manipulating/displaying a fairly complex set of marketing data. I've done this sort of thing before so the analysis, database etc. holds no issues for me, but the client would most likely prefer ASP.NET as they have some (small) amount of experience with this.

My current default language for web apps is PHP, although I have coded some ASP some time ago. I've been coding for 20 years and have a stack of languages and technologies under my belt - including Perl, Java, VB, Delphi and C - so learning a new environment doesn't worry me, but nevertheless I'd like to get up to speed with the least effort and as quickly as possible.

What books, websites or other resources would you recommend to most efficiently achieve this?

Answer 1

asp.net is a great site with tons of resources and videos for getting started. I'd download VS Express and start cranking through the videos.

Answer 2

Since you're an experienced coder, I would suggest simply diving in and you'll pick it up as you go. From your list of skills, it is most like Delphi (Event-Driven programming).

http://www.codeproject.com is very helpful and has many articles on ASP.NET, including ones for beginners and experts.

I would also suggest an alternative: There is another implementation of ASP.NET called ASP.NET MVC (http://www.asp.net/mvc/). With your background, I have a feeling this will make more sense, and I personally believe it is a much better platform that WebForms. I also believe this site (stackoverflow) was built using it.

Hope this helps...

Answer 3

The thing with learning ASP.NET is that you should first gain an understanding of the .NET framework and how it works, as there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than in the other interpreted languages you're familiar with. After this you'll need to decide what version of the runtime (1.1 or 2.0 but only do 1.1 for legacy reasons) you'll be coding in .

Once you're ready to get your feet wet, Set yourself up with a book (for reference) and all the website references and you'll be good to go. For a book I would recommend either O'Reily's ASP.NET book or the ASP.Net 2.0 Anthology (if you're going to do ASP.NET 2.0 and code in C#).

Answer 4

Official ASP.NET forums (http://forums.asp.net/) will be a big help and for quick references and helps. Then i always like to go to w3schools for quick tutorials (http://www.w3schools.com/ASPNET/).These code snippets will let you quickly become familiar with ASP.NET concepts.

Pro ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008 is a good book you should use as a reference and you should get familiar with ASP.NET AJAX components. For that i suggest Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX

Answer 5

If you must use web forms for asp.net, the event model will be the source of much pain and suffering for you since you are coming from an web developer mindset thinking request/response simplicity (which is a good thing).

First thing to get deep into is the lifecycle of an asp.net request. Learn about IHttpModules, IHttpHandlers, then the asp.net Page (just an implementation of IHttpHandler).

Otherwise I would also recommend looking into the MVC implementation as well.