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I'm new to .NET - what should I concentrate on and what should I ignore?

Asked 2008-12-23T17:17:51.003
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So, I've had a fair amount of experience programming database driven web apps using php and coldfusion (not together, at different times) and I'm starting to look into the asp.net world (I have a project coming up at work that is all asp.net/c#.)

My question is: there seems to be a lot of stuff to get mired in and if I'm just making web-based applications (mostly CRUD-type stuff - no mind-bending logic) what are the topics I should be focusing on? I just don't want to go down the rabbit trail of something to find out later that it's not really used too much by the development community. In reading some books (ASP.net 3.5 step by step and ASP.net 3.5 unleashed) I'm finding some area's where a topic will be explained but at the end of the chapter it'll say "this stuff is cool but not for use in multi-tiered applications..."

The topics I've looked at so far (that seem to differ greatly from the applications I'm used to building) are:

  • Master pages
  • DataBinding
  • Linq to SQL
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • Templates and databinding expressions
  • asp.net controls
c# .net data-binding master-pages
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I would say your list is a pretty good start. In addition, if you are mostly building table-direct apps then I would look at the "Dynamic Data" sample applications in VS2008 SP1 which uses REST. I would tend to stay away from the WebForms model and use ASP.Net MVC. It's better for testing, and cleanly separates business logic from the UI. Also, Linq-to-Sql is a very powerful tool when you know it's limitiions.

I would start by building a sample using ASP.Net MVC and linq-to-sql to get your feet wet. It's fairly easy to get started, and shouldn't take long to learn enough of the basics to make it useful.

The Best way to learn is to do.

As far as "What should I ignore?": .Net Remoting and Web Services. This has been replaced with a much more powerful framework called WCF.

answered 2008-12-23T17:23:07.890

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