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Where to start: APS.Net site with Visual Studio

I

IamDavid

Diamond Member
I'm needing to learn some basic programming for work. I've used Excel to do everything up till now. It's been a great tool but I now need to share all the info/data with everyone at work. Problem is I know nothing when it comes to programming.. I am willing to learn and am excited but I have no idea where to start.

I have Visual Studio 2008.
We have 3 different Databases, 1 SQL and 2 Informix.. Long story, none can be changed. Although we do try consolidating some info from the Informix ones into the SQL..

I have used Dreamweaver in the past to piece together some pretty neat sites, ALL WYSIWYG work. They impressed allot of people including our current IT people. I did explain I know nothing about how I did it.

looking everywhere I am more confused than ever on whee to begin.. Learn VB? Learn ASP? Have to learn both? Don't need either??

Please give me some guidance. Thanks!
 
Your Dreamweaver experience has probably given you an appreciation, or at least basic comprehension, of HTML, but to get information from a database onto a web page requires a couple of additional layers of knowledge, and knowing that you have no programming experience makes it difficult to give good advice. Ordinarily you would start with simple programming chores in C# or VB: put text in a window, add numbers, that sort of thing. That's light years from getting data out of a SQL Server DB (much less Informix) and formatting it into a web page. Honestly it's a pretty tall order if you're starting from absolute scratch. Unless you have a couple of years to get up to speed you might want to consider hiring a consultant or staff developer that you can work with during the learning phase.
 
What are the requirments? just display data? or also data entry? (custom) reporting?

If you really want to go (or must) the MS way, check out the ms pages (http://www.asp.net/).
Tons of tutorials for starting and forum.
Also have a look at asp.net mvc (so i don't really know it) but classic asp.net ist not so great imho.

for simple web applications I would check out the Grails framework:

http://www.grails.org/

Very cool for beginners if you want to create simple web applications. But then it all depends on if you are forced to use .net or not.
 
What kind of data are you looking to display? Does it need to be a pretty website that can be referred to customers or is this internal only and just need to be utilitarian?

If it's the latter, I'd say look into a report engine like MS SQL Reporting Services, or if you've got a budget to burn maybe something like Crystal Reports. You don't need to know about programming, just point it at the database and it's easy to build web reports of existing views. Then just go from there.
 
BoberFett said:
What kind of data are you looking to display? Does it need to be a pretty website that can be referred to customers or is this internal only and just need to be utilitarian?

If it's the latter, I'd say look into a report engine like MS SQL Reporting Services, or if you've got a budget to burn maybe something like Crystal Reports. You don't need to know about programming, just point it at the database and it's easy to build web reports of existing views. Then just go from there.
Click to expand...

Reportiing Services is part of what we have currently have. Still have to know how to program somewhat don't I? Our IT department consist of a few hardware guys who know little about anything and don't want to learn a thing..
I thought the reporting services had something to do with ASP. Show's how lost I am..

This site is for internal use only and doesn't have to be retty at all. If so I can make one look pretty. Like I said, I currently use Excel to do all of what I'm describing.... Connect to multiple Servers/Databases and run reports from there. I have pieced together the needed SQL queries and made the reports dynamic which was fun and apperently really neat as I'm always told. lol

This will not, should not take me years to do. That makes no sense at all. With a tool like Visual Studio I can't imagine it taking long at all. In fact I could probably piece together something usable just by copying from different places but I'd rather learn something useful this time.. Just don't have a clue as to where to start..

Thanks again for your help.
 
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