Any .NET experts here?

Check your PM

 

Best of luck Rob. I have lots of asp experience, but unfortunately, very little in the .net world. Soon, I'll be diving in and creating an internal site, but not just yet.

 

The only reason .NET is a pain in the ass is that the learning materials for the .NET platform, well suck compared to the EXCELLENT J2EE publications and resources.

You'll probably find you use stored prodedures a lot more.

VISIO is torture for modeling.

Get this instead.

http://www.borland.com/together/viewlets.html

 

if you already have a fundamental basis in programming, and web style stuff, then the transition to ASP won't be too hard.

in the various high-level languages and dialects i've had to pick up over time, the biggest difference between them has been syntax and what word means what. they can all be done in your own style and structure, it just a matter of knowing what functions you have available and what you have to create yourself.

IF and CASE and whatever fundamental methods are much the same across the board, so the major thing that has to be taken into account is how data is dealt with, and that's less of a programming language issue as it is about learning the idiosyncrasies of the data technology your messing with.

for me, the biggest hugest pain in the ass is the fact that no two languages deal with TIME and DATE fields in the same way, so i'm forever writing functions that convert back and forth, add to that no two databases use the same TIME and DATE structures, and you end up having to remember anywhere up to a dozen different methods for messing with the data.

i haven't done a great deal with .net as yet, but if you're doing ASP then start with .net as it's a large enough paradigm shift to make it not exactly easy to port existing code.

writing and implementing anything is easy, so long as your user does exactly what you want them to. 98% of programming is dealing with exceptions to the rules you've already set, called "bugs" by users.

 

oh, wot's a BA?

i can only think of Mr T.

 

I made the transition from Visual C++/MFC to C#, VB.NET, and ASP.NET when there was next to no learning materials (.NET Beta 1). The transition really wasn't that bad. If you know Java, then C# is syntactically similar.

When you install the .NET Framework, it should also install some quickstart tutorials. ibuyspy.com used to be a Microsoft demo/tutorial site on implementing a .NET site, but it's currently a .NET portal.

The guys in the software dev dept are playing w/ VS.NET 2005 (codename: Whidbey). From what they tell me, ASP.NET 2.0 is a significant jump from ASP.NET 1.0 as ASP.NET 1.0 was from just ASP. Developing web apps in VS.NET 2005 requires even less manual coding!

I sent you a PM, Rob.

Michael.

Programmin's as easy as cut'n'paste code

 

agree with all the points brought up here specially the lack of learning material. But after a while it just gets 'easier' in a way i would say.

 

heh, i don't have any qualifications, but still managed to put together some decent stuff.

i'm a full-time student of Google University.