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

[Peter Brunone (EasyListBox.com)]

Hi Sarah,

   Re. Visual Studio, I avoid it whenever possible for web pages, but that's because I'm in there so often tinkering with HTML/CSS/Javascript, and I don't want the designer messing up my code, which it will do more often than not.  If you're a purist, it will drive you nuts.

   Re. the pros and cons, I have just the article for you.  It's written by Charles Carroll, a long-time ASP trainer who strongly dislikes certain parties at MS -- read the manifesto linked on the main page if you dare -- while still being able to appreciate the technology that they put out.  The material is a bit dated (written during one of the betas), but the greater part still applies.

http://learnasp.com/freebook/learn/differences.aspx

   Of course LearnASP.com is a good spot for lessons on .NET "Classic" ASP; just make sure you're not a neat freak or you might be a bit put off by the presentation.

   There are many other advantages over the old stuff, like the validation controls (one of which I posted here for Tom Dell'Aringa recently).  If you want your mind blown by some of the more advanced data display features, you can read some of the articles at http://datagridgirl.com/articles.aspx .

   For what it's worth, the Quickstart tutorials at http://asp.net are pretty decent as well; you just have to read through most of the material to know where everything is.  A great book for ASP.NET is Steven Walther's ASP.NET Unleashed from Sams press.  It's not really VS-oriented, but it will give you what you need to get the job done.

Let me know if any of this is helpful or if I can help with anything else...

Peter

 From: Sarah Sweeney mr.sanders at designshift.com

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