Newbie Question

  • Thread starter Thread starter igendreau
  • Start date Start date
I

igendreau

Sorry to bug anyone with this, but I am a newb. Here's the deal:

I am very experienced with VBA, do a ton of programming in Access. I
also have a lot of basic experience with ASP. Fire up Dreamweaver,
create an HTMl page to capture data, fire up a blank page, and type in
all my code to process that data to or from a simple database.

I just got Visual Studio 2005, and want to start programming. Where
the heck do I start? A good book? or web site? Frankly, all the .NET
talk confuses the heck out of me a bit. I fire up VS 2005 and start a
new web page, and I'm honestly not sure how the heck I make that
something that someone can get to.

The short term goal for me is the Crystal Reports feature in VS 2005.
I want to add some basic reporting on our intranet. I have a machine
running IIS right now and serving a few asp pages. In Dreamweaver, it
was just fire up a blank page, code it, save it with a .asp extension
and go! Struggling to narrow down the starting point here.

Any recommendations on where I should kick off my learning would be
very welcome. Thanks!
 
As someone who came to .NET from a VB 6.0, VBA, VBScript background in 2002
(when .NET was first publicly released), I can honestly tell you to forget
what you know about VB as you move to learn VB .NET.

Sure, there are going to be things that will still work in much the same way
as they used to, but that is only on the surface. Under the hood, VB .NET
is absolutely nothing like any of its predecessors.

First, you'll need to be proficient with Object-Oriented Programming (not
just Object-Based Programming, which is what VB 6.0, VBA was). There are
many books, web sites and blogs you can refer to about OOP.

Second, you should begin to learn about the .NET Framework. What it is,
data types, memory management, etc.

Lastly, learn how to apply the VB .NET language with the .NET Framework.
Francesco Balena is a well known and respected authority on VB and his book
on VB .NET 2005 is excellent (as was his books on VB 6.0 and VB .NET 2003).
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-M...7085713?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177553870&sr=1-3

-Good luck!
 
If you're going to do any CR's, then I STRONGLY advise you to read:

http://support.businessobjects.com/communityCS/TechnicalPapers/rtm_reportingoffadonetdatasets.pdf

Please review this

http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/2148.aspx

The absolute best thing you can do for creating CR's is to create a
(strongly typed) dataset, and bind the CR to it.

And I advise AGAINST having your CR talk directly to the database via sql or
stored procedures.

You can use stored procedures to populate the (strongly typed) dataset. But
always use a strong dataset as the middle man.



The reason is that CR does some crazy voodoo sometimes. And its 10,000
times harder to debug when you don't have that dataset middle man.



I have some tierd examples at:

6/5/2006
Custom Objects and Tiered Development II // 2.0
http://sholliday.spaces.live.com/blog/

that you might want to look at.
 
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