Best way to get up to speed with ASP.Net and VB.Net

[Bulldog13]

Good morning Programming Forum!

I am making a lateral move within my company to development from web design. The new group I will be working with uses ASP.Net and VB.Net. My programming background is in Java and VB6. Can anyone recommend any books or online tutorials that are geared towards a professional developer who is just looking to change languages? I believe most of this development will focus on moving stuff into and out of SQL Server, so any resources that focus on ASP.Net and VB.Net as relating to data manipulation in SQL Server would be excellent!

I have found a few tutorials online, but they seem to start from the very beginning "Hello World!"...I was hoping for something that is faster paced.

I would like to be able to hit the ground running, so I have a little less than a week to learn the basics of the 2 .Net languages.

Thanks!

 

[Markbnj]

I think "a little less than a week" might be a challenge coming at it fairly cold. There are two big areas you need to understand, as far as I can tell from your post... well actually three.

The first is .Net in general. It is different architecturally, and moreover it brings a huge, rich framework class library to the table that provides most of what you need to get things done.

The second is ASP.Net, which is a page-generation framework for IIS, based on the .Net platform. It brings another huge, rich set of classes to the table oriented toward processing HTTP requests, and combining HTML, script, code, and resources to output responses back to client browsers.

The third is the .Net DataProvider model and the classes available for opening database connections, building and executing commands, and processing results. Another aspect of this is data-binding, which allows you to easily get data from query result sets into controls on a page.

Another factor is which version of .Net your group is currently working with. ASP.Net is in version 2.0, and the .Net framework in general is at 3.5, but a lot of companies are still stuck in 1.1-land, and there are significant differences in ASP.net between 1.1 and 2.0.

So it's a pretty tall order. There are some good tutorial sites out there. I'd dive in at http://www.asp.net and check out their tutorials and sample projects. You might download a relatively simple application like a blog package or picture gallery, load it up in VS2005/2008 and run it on the local dev web server to step through and see how it works.

And of course feel free to post any questions here. Given the short timeframe, you'll need to pick an area and focus on it, and it sounds like maybe it should be the database stuff.