A New Day Dawning

Ok… I have conceded at last. I’m going to learn ASP.NET

Not that it’s that hard, but — until recently — I haven’t really wanted to do any work with it.  It just seemed like a waste of time.

So what’s changed? Well, for starters, the company I work for is going down the path of getting more of their development done by contractors. In and of itself, that’s not a big deal. Tonight I met one of the guys who will be doing some of the contract work, though.

I was actually impressed. He was a young guy, but was already the Director of IT at a company and had extensive experience with enterprise-level solutions. We talked a bit about the project we’d be working on together and a little about .NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, etc. Quite a knowledgable guy, actually… And he mentioned that he had some friends who were at our disposal if we needed anyone for performance-tuning, SQL development, or pretty much anything else.

…and that’s when it happened. I felt that competitive spark within me flicker a bit….

And what happened then…?
Well…in Who-ville they say
that the Grinch’s small heart
Grew three sizes that day!

…or something like that. I’ve needed something to work towards and someone to learn from. Granted, this situation still doesn’t quite do that as well as if I was in a development shop working with talented folks every day, but I’ll certainly settle for a reasonable approximation to it for the time being, I suppose.

I look forward to seeing what this guy and his buddies can do — if only so I can attempt to learn from and then surpass them soon.

3 thoughts on “A New Day Dawning

  1. dscott,
    Yeah… CSS is definitely on my list of things to learn.

    Same goes for some of the trendy stuff like AJAX, SharePoint, etc. that I keep hearing about but know very little of.

    First thing’s first, though… I want to at least have some basic ASP.NET skills soon so I can at least help maintain some of our existing stuff.

  2. I think you might find the ASP.NET side interesting. It has its quirks compared to the “WinForms” side of things, but nothing overly complicated. At least in my experience.

    The challenge of course is implementing the other “Web Standards” type stuff. Learning CSS, HTML, and all of the other Web technologies that can be used to increase the look and usibility of ASP.NET. If anything it all, it exposes you to the full range of the .NET Framework.

  3. The AJAX stuff is pretty cool. MS has recently released RC1 of their version for .NET. It was called Atlas, but I think they changed the name.

    I think you will pick up ASP.NET fairly quickly. I like the DEITEL & DEITEL “How to Program” series, I’d reccomend one of those books. The have a “World Wide Web” book that goes over all of the major Web technologies including ASP.NET, which might be a good place to start if you arent all that familiar with Web technologies in general. Then pick up one of their ASP.NET books.

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