paulmignard

It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about doing some .NET development and it hasn’t exactly been a…man, what’s a good analogy? A hill of beans? A walk in the park? I know, I’ve been doing some .NET development and it hasn’t exactly been as bad as dragging my face through a pool filled with shards of glass and viruses. I think I really got off to the wrong foot though. It seems like most books/tutorials/videos for noobs consist mainly of using data components (those one you create in tags that don’t require any “actual code”) – which is cool – but it lulls you into a false sense of “wow, this is so easy I just need to drag and drop and oh wow this is so cool mang!!!!!” Obviously once you want to do something more than a simple CRUD operation on a single table you really start to realize you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re probably not going to know for some time. Fortunately I came across some stuff that really helped me get a grasp how to write asp.net with some amount of sanity (not necessarily properly, just without me wanting to to cram cicadas in my ears to stop the pain):

C#: At work I’m starting to work on an app that is written in VB.NET…yeah, I’m not starting a language war here but it’s been many many years since I touched some VB code and it was too hard to try and wrap my mind around. I quickly set up the app to compile both VB and C# classes so I could keep the legacy while I develop new stuff and haven’t looked back since.

I’m not say there is anything wrong with VB, it’s just not for me.

ASP.NET MVC: Ideally, I would re-code the entire app in this framework – it’s really pretty awesome. Obviously if you’re familiar with CodeIgnitor or rails(I don’t need to link to rails do I?) or just about any other MVC framework out there this won’t be a huge jump but it was nice to see how to write a web app without using asp.net components or code-behind or viewstate (ug, I know viewstate is pretty cool and it’s not like a user will ever really see it but I just don’t like it sitting there all snug in my html for some strange reason.) Plus the built-in IDE support was really handy, it really let’s you wire stuff together fairly fast.

Linq to SQL: No, it’s not dying. And why should it, it’s pretty awesome. I’ve been using linqpad to get a handle on the syntax and am getting a pretty good feel on how to use it throughout the application. The LINQ to SQL designer is pretty handy, although I sheepishly admit that I this point I don’t even care how it does its magic, I’m just glad it’s doing it.

Visual Studio: I’ve spent the last year in the eclipse IDE and while I’m not ready to say that Visual Studio is the new hotness for me, it has been pretty useful. Even running it in a VM it’s pretty smooth and having spent so long coding flex it’s nice to have an IDE that feels like it’s just itching to complete just about everything I type.

.NET Podcasts: I spend about 40 minutes driving each and like to learn something during that time – I recommend .NET rocks and Deep Fried Bytes…there are others but those are the two that I actually look forward to listening to…

So those are my tales of triumph and woe…i’m interested in trying some other .NET stuff like mono, silverlight (yes, I do want to at least try it), and XNA but we’ll see what I have time for. Maybe I should just focus on completing my app.