User-1760427068 posted
If you're interested, send me a private message and I'll work with you on a beginning project or two to "get you off the ground".
I've found ASP.NET very enjoyable and ammenable to learning by seeing examples. Sometimes it helps to have something in hand that works, you can see how it works, and then you read about it in one of the books.
Where to begin?
I assume you will want to do things like create a table in the database, add records to the table and change data in the records. This can be done using SQL statements. I don't know if there is something analogous to it in ASP. However,
I remember SQL was probably the "friendliest" thing to learn when moving into ASP.NET.
After working with several people on getting started projects, two things come to the forefront. You need to put a database file in your web site and it works well to let it take the default name, Database.mdf. Control + shift + A brings up about
two dozen choices of templates for new items and you want SQL Server Database. Let the computer give it the name Database.mdf and yes, you want to put it in a folder called App_Data (and since Visual Web Developer comes out and asks you if
you want to do this, I'm assuming Visual Studio 2008 will also ask you "Do you want to put it in App_Data"--just say yes).
With a Database.mdf in App_Data, you then want to change a part of your web.config file, the part where connection strings are place.
Find <connectionStrings />
and change it to
<connectionStrings>
<add name="ConnectionString" connectionString="Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;AttachDbFilename=|DataDirectory|\Database.mdf;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True"
providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
</connectionStrings>
Briefly notice that within the connection string it has Database.mdf which you previously created.
At this point you can write small programs to try different things. I have a few I can give to you.
There are three Executes: ExecuteReader(), ExecuteNonQuery() and ExecuteScalar() and you definitely want to learn about the first two right away. ExecuteReader() will "look" through your table and find all the records, or selectively find records if
you ask it to be selective (for example you tell it to look for records in a table of grades where the value is greater than 90).
ExecuteNonQuery() is used with SQL for creating tables, adding records to tables and updating data in tables (using SQL statements).
I would recommend working with a Label control and having it show things that come from a table. Maybe the table has two fields, firstname and lastname (and the table is named People) and you have ExecuteReader() go through it and for each record do
something like print lastname + ", " + firstname + "<br />". This proves you can take data from a table and display it, which I am sure is one of your early objectives.
You may want to do some math. Maybe you have a table with names and prices and you have the code behind take a price and multiply it by 1.05 to show the effect of a 5% tax.
At this point you may want to do some work with the controls such as a DropDownList or a RadioButtonList. You can use SqlDataSource to with a DropDownList--the SqlDataSource finds things table and then the DropDownList uses the SqlDataSource.
Maybe you are interested in two things, the name of something and an ID code for it, and you configure the DropDownList so that it shows the product name and when it is selected, the ID code is also available (for example: a customer makes a selection based
on the product name but when the purchase is processed the ID code is sent to a table.) {this deals with selecteditem and selectedvalue}
There are wizards you can use after you drag something onto an aspx page--you'll want to become familiar with these because they speed up the web page building process.
I laid out some things I thought might interest a person starting at the very beginning because I remember some of the beginning steps were a little more difficult. Sometimes it's a little hard to ask the question in a way that gives you the answer
your need.
