ASP.NET in a month
I’m planning to learn ASP.NET over the next month or so. It’s been an ongoing thing that was part of my initial reason for choosing the job I did, but was never really pursued by myself or my boss. That’s changing fast and by October I’d like to know it enough to be able to work effectively on some bigger projects at work.
But how do you learn a framework, a completely different way of programming, in a short time?
PHP
I learnt PHP in the space of a month or so a few years back by literally throwing myself and my time into it. I set myself stupid targets such as writing a working forum system in a single 24 hour period - which actually worked, and I enjoyed it.
The major difference here is that I’m not saying I want to learn C# as a language - I’m sure that’s easy enough - I’m aiming to learn a significant part of the .NET framework and how to use Visual Studio to make websites. So that’s why I’ve spent a while hunting for different ways of learning and now settled on my chosen method.
ASP.NET Videos
On Friday I downloaded all of the ASP.NET videos off of the Official Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 site. And, having no plans for this weekend - I’ve started chugging away through them, also installing Visual Studio Web Developer Express to let me try out any examples along the way.
Learning Plan
A big problem with me approaching the ASP.NET framework is that I don’t know what’s in it, so I can’t plan out what I want to learn. So along with the videos, I’ve also got a copy of a big ASP.NET book from work. Hopefully any questions that aren’t covered in the videos will be answered in the book, and if not - I still have a few guys at work that I can ask.
Week 1
It’s only Day 3. I’ve managed to watch the first 7 of 14 basic tutorial videos from the site linked above, and I’ve played around with Visual Web Developer a little to get a feel for where everything is. I’m going to try to allocate some time at work to finish watching the rest of the basic tutorials this week, and I’ll keep this blog up to date with how I’m progressing.