VB.Net Tutorials

Question

My company's moving to VB.Net in the near future and I need to make the move from "Classic" ASP (i.e. VBScript)

I've had a look at www.asp.net but most of the tutorials appear to be in video format which I can't access at the office. And I'm currently looking at http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/quickstart/aspplus/doc/quickstart.aspx

Ideally what I'm looking for is a tutorial that will show me how to build a simple site from start to finish so I can get my head around the techniques used - I learn better by "Doing"!

Also if anyone has any recommendations for books (my Boss is buying!) That'd be great.

Thanks in advance for your help

Edit: Please note that C# isn't an option, I'm looking for VB.Net only

Answer 1

Try this: http://www.startvbdotnet.com/

Answer 2

The asp.net site has a "learn" tab that contains great tutorials for those starting out: http://www.asp.net/learn/. They show you how to build a complete site through a series of tutorials with VB and C#.

It's how I learned .NET when I was hired by my current employer.

Answer 3

Try http://www.LearnVisualStudio.com

They have a ton of video's and add new ones all the time. I've been a "lifetime" member for about 3 years.

They have a series from start to finish, free video's, and you may also want to look at the video series available at http://www.ASP.net

Answer 4

Whatever you do, make sure your team don't just learn the new language - make sure that they understand well the implications of the change from asp classic to asp.net, architecturally for your application.

Make sure they understand what asp.net is doing under the hood too. Even though they are out of date a bit, I wholeheartedly recommend the Fritz Onion books for this. They are available for C# and VB.

Good luck with the change!

Answer 5

There are a LOT of changes to the way things get done in ASP.Net. The language grammar is similar, but that's about it. Before your team starts working on code that will eventually go into production, make sure everyone has a good understanding of the page life cycle, custom controls and how to use them to divide up functionality logically, viewstate, and has a least a small amount of practice using the base class library.

Some good advice would be to seek out some sample code and see how it's put together.

Answer 6

Not exactly the answer you are looking for here but it comes with experience. If you are just now looking to move from classic asp to asp.net please consider using C# instead of VB.NET.

The language is more concise and strict so mistakes are easy to find and correct, a lot of them will be pointed out to you by the compiler. This is of course my opinion and others may disagree.

But a couple of facts to help you are that most example code is written in C# and books for the .net languages might be published in both C# and VB.NET versions but the C# versions are published first. If they can't afford to publish a book in both versions then it will get published in C#.

The tutorials and videos available on http://www.asp.net are excellent. There is also a forums section out there where you will find answers to a lot of your "getting started" type of questions.

Answer 7

I have been learning ASP.NET using Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. Along the way, I came across this structured set of ASP.NET tutorials at DotNetSpider. I want to give them a plug - although the tutorials could be polished some, they are very easy to follow and build up slowly on a good fundamental base. I am halfway through them right now.

Answer 8

I'm also just about to move our development from classic to .NET (it's nice to know we're aren't the only one lagging behind :) ). I've just bought Building a Web 2.0 Portal in ASP.NET 3.5 and ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed. Even though these books focus on C# (unleashed has VB code on the CD though) and I'm expecting that we'll move to VB.NET when the time comes I'm finding them massively helpful in understanding how ASP.NET fits together.

Answer 9

When I made the jump from a php world into the ASP.NET arena, I lived at the 4 guys site. They have good explanations of most of the key concepts that you'll need to grasp. In addition, the key writer Scott Mitchell has started publishing articles on the asp.net site. If you go to follow this link, you'll notice the tutorials section. Those aren't videos and you can gain some insight on different fundamentals. The 4 guys sites is a little dated because it doesn't talk about linq to sql etc, but I still find it useful occasionally and I don't put much stock in linq.

Answer 10

The best book I read to get my head around VB.NET was Object-Oriented Programming with Visual Basic .NET. Here it is at Amazon.

It's based on .NET 1.1 which is a bit dated now, but it's still a great way to delve into the .NET features and framework from an OO perspective, which will help tremendously since the old classic ASP didn't do OO at all. Most books show framework features, syntax, and basic usage. This one goes light on the syntax (which you already have a grip on from classic ASP anyway), and really walks you through the major features and concepts of VB.NET. It's not as long as some other books either, and you can get through it cover-to-cover pretty easily.

Other than that, code, code, code! :)