Getting started with ASP.Net

October 25, 2006

OK, here is another post that has been re-purposed from an email I sent. I had someone looking to get started on the .Net/ASP.Net platform and was looking for help. Since I could tell that I was probably going to get sucked into some type of longer term support role for this person, I decided to recommend some way that they could help themselves.

.Net as a platform is quite nice and brings a lot to the table in terms of development. Unfortunately, it also gives you lots of flexibility to do things in less than ideal ways. While it would be nice to just have one pattern for how to do something, quite the opposite is true and there is seldom consistency around anything.

So, for you as an apparent newbie to ASP.Net, I would recommend the following:
- A book or two on ASP.Net 2.0 is a great place to start. These come in handy for reference and some will actually walk you through building an application.
- Hang out at the ASP.Net Forums. There are many forums dedicated to complete newbies to .Net. What’s nice is you’ll get answers to your questions from someone who just walked in your shoes two weeks ago. I spent lots of time there several years ago when trying to make the break from ASP to ASP.Net
- Check out the Starter Kits. These are great sample apps to help you get a feel for how an ASP.Net app is built. And annoyingly enough, each one of these starter kits was built completely differently (at least back when I went through them). This would give me fits because I wanted to know the one “right way” to do things. You eventually pick and choose what works best for you and your situation.
- Another approach that I have recommended to several newbies at my day job is to purchase a subscription to LearnVisualStudio.net. You get access to over 500 videos (over 100 hours of content). You can’t really beat this concept. First, the price is just right - you can get a three month subscription for the price of a tech book. Second, the videos are awesome - great quality, great content.
- If you have your backend mapped out, you could look at tools like CodeCharge or Iron Speed. While I haven’t directly used either, I know CodeCharge has been around for several years and might actually be more along the lines of what you are looking for. They make it easy to take an application concept and generate the necessary code. One of our MyHomePoint competitors, HomeConvenience.com, appears to be built around such a concept/tool.
- If you are feeling really adventerous, you could download the source code for the ASP.Net Forums (and our site and many other sites around the web) The Microsoft developer (Rob Howard) originally working on those forums many years ago left and took the open source code with him to a new gig called Telligent where it was re-packaged as Community Server. They maintain the code and have extended it greatly. However, this is a project that has been under development for many years and is quite large. It could be quite daunting to just jump in and figure out your way around. But there are a lot of really good practices to learn from in the code. We implemented a lot of things we saw in there in our MyHP code.

Obviously there are tons of other resources out there, but these are a few of my favorite tactics. Anyone have any suggestions of their own?

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under .Net, ASP.Net, Microsoft 

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