[thelist] skeptical about the "benefits" of .NET (Visual Studio, Visual Basic, and ASP)

[Sarah Sweeney]

I'll be starting work soon on a project in ASP.NET (written in VB.NET, 
developed in Visual Studio .NET - because I'm collaborating with people 
from another company). So far in my reading on the subject, everything 
introductory I've read seems to be written by some marketing person who 
knows a bunch of buzzwords but doesn't really know anything about 
programming. So my questions are:

Can you recommend a good tutorial for VB.NET, ASP.NET and/or Visual 
Studio .NET, preferably not written from an "I love Microsoft" perspective?

What are the pros and cons of ASP.NET over classic ASP (in plain English)?

What are the pros and cons of developing in Visual Studio, rather than 
using my usual (non-WYSIWYG) editor?

My (so far brief) intro to Visual Studio leads me to believe that it 
probably outputs some really ugly HTML, as many WYSIWYG editors do - is 
it as bad as I think, and are there ways to avoid/minimize the ugliness?

TIA!

-- 
Sarah Sweeney  ::  Web Developer & Programmer
Portfolio  ::  http://sarah.designshift.com
Blog  ::  http://hardedge.ca