I am glad to find this forum. It has a lot of helpful discusses and ideas. Although I have more than five years of programming experience in C/C++, I am pretty new to Web application. I have read a book on C# and a book on ASP.NET (Essential ASP.NET with Examples
in C#). I recently purchased a Visual Studio .NET Professional 2003 (VS.NET hereafter) and a Dreamweaver MX 2004. I was hoping that I could take advantage of both packages so I can develop the application as soon as possible. But I found out problems: 1. The
user manual came with VS.NET package seems very minimal. Can anyone suggest one or two books which will give me a quick start on how to use this software efficiently? 2. How can I combine Dreamweaver MX and VS.NET to fully utilize their potential? Or, even
worse, can these two package work together hand-in-hand? My first thought was to start design presentation part and as much as behaviors in Dreamweaver MX and then enhance business logic by using VS.NET? Is this approach feasible? Or I have to do it the other
way around (i.e. start from VS.NET and then enhance the presentation part in Dreamweaver MX)? Or I don’t even need Dreamweaver MX at all (i.e. VS.NET can provide most of features/functionalities offered by Dreamweaver MX)? Or I should use Web Matrix instead
of Dreamweaver MX? 3. Even though, I can understand most of code in the book I read (i.e. Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C#), I found it is still a puzzle to put all the pieces together to build a working site? Can anyone recommend any books/sample codes
to fill this gap? Any helps, thoughts, suggestions or ideas are much appreciated.
Visual Studio can be intimidating at first, but it helps to take a look at the MSDN webcasts and see how the presenters use the interface. Also, the O'Reilly book on VS.NET was a great starting point. I think it's the one with the Stork on the cover. The Essential
ASP.NET book provides a great foundational approach to the underlying archtiecture of ASP.NET, but it offers little guidance on Visual Studio. Of course, VS is a different animal altogether. I immensely disliked Interdev (sorry ;) ) and avoided it for a long
while (since 1997). All my classic ASP work was done in either Notepad or Dreamweaver. A lot of my annoyances have been resolved in VS 2003, so I use it a lot now. But, keep in mind, no matter which tool you use, you can still mix it up. I had to make some
HTML formatting changes to an ASPX page recently and notepad provided me with all that I needed. More importantly, it didn't bug me about making corrections to my HTML.
I've been thinking a bit more about cafeeo's last question: how does someone who is new to this whole game "put it all together." I'm actually pretty optimistic about that question. I think there are lots of great articles out there that unravel the puzzle
of how to use ASP.Net and how to use Dreamweaver (to create useful web apps using ASP.Net). So I'm going to put out a little challenge to my friends on this forum: let's put together a list of really great articles that we would recommend that newcomers read
first. Here's a couple ideas to get the ball rolling: "Using Dreamweaver MX with Visual Studio.NET" by Julian Roberts (aka Jules) http://www.charon.co.uk/content.aspx?CategoryID=30&ArticleID=58 Macromedia's own "ASP.NET Topic Center" http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/dotnet/
"Implementing Forms-Based Authentication" by Heidi Bautista (my wife!) http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/dreamweaver/articles/forms_authentication.html What would you point someone like cafeeo to?
I would point to the tutorials on this site. I know I learned a lot from them in the beginning and still take a look at them from time to time. Also, ASP.net Unleashed is a really good book in my opinion.
cafeeo
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