Projects to build while trying to learn ASP.NET 3.5

Question

I have been wanting to learn web development for a long time, however without a goal to work towards I've been mostly stuck to following tutorials in books. I do much better when I have something to work towards. What sort of web pages to people normally get started on building? I'm an experienced professional C++ programmer so it doesn't necessarily need to be all that simple.

Answer 1

I think developing your own blog is a good beginner project for web development.

Answer 2

As with any other web development technology. a very common type of ASP.Net website is a CRUD website, which can become quite complex.

It could be a contact manager, a product inventory/ordering system, a project management system.

The basic types of web pages are: create an entity (person, product, task) and populate its properties in the database. Display one or many of the existing entities. Displaying multiple items leads you to the various grid controls, which can become quite sophisticated -- paging, sorting, master-detail, editing. You might create a search page which has a bunch of textboxes and dropdownlists for the user to select the search criteria (entity properties). The list of matching results is displayed, and the user can click on one to go to a view/edit details page.

Depending upon whether you are already familiar with SQL, this will all lead you to writing SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE scripts or stored procedures. You can also explore ADO.Net's many database access tools -- typed datasets, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entity, and so on.

Once you have all of that working, you can enhance the pages' functionality and responsiveness by adding Ajax to them.

This should get you off to a good start.

Answer 3

Back in the old days, the first web pages would be simple, "Hello World," kind of pages. By old days I mean about 1995 or so.

My suggestion would be to find something that can be database-driven. If you like movies and own a number of DVDs, then a basic application that would let you look over the DVDs you have. The ability to add, edit, and delete would be an initial work but then the fun of looking at various analytics, e.g. are there some common elements in most of those DVDs like what studio produced it or who directed it, etc.

Music could be just as easily done as movies. Friends and family's contact information could also work. The key is for it to have something that you could use combined with learning some new stuff. This is pretty similar to DOK's answer.