I am a newcomer to ASP, and would like to experiment with it by writing a website for a club at my school using .net 2008 and the mySql database available from the school's apache server. What is the best way to set this up, since I see a lot of options to connect the web app to SQL Server or Oracle databases, but I'm nervous that it won't work correctly with mySql.
Also, will I still be able to use LINQ queries?
Check out this url: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/dotnet/index.html
Get a hold of the MySQL Connector for ASP.NET and start coding as usual for MySQL. the connector gives you all the advantages of data adapters, data readers, etc. in the typical ADO.NET structure you are used to for SQL or Oracle. That way if you do swap things out on the back end in the future, you won't have to worry about swapping out all your connect/query code.