Recently I was in a conference where I was approached by a few young and enthusiast professionals asking me how to use ASP.NET, not only just that, recently I noticed a couple of posts regarding that in Quora.com as well. There people were asking specialist advice on the best way to master ASP.NET.
Keeping that in mind, I have come up with this ASP.NET tutorial which will give you a good understanding of not the best ways to master ASP.NET but also some of the fastest techniques to get the acquainted with this subject.
Laying the Groundwork
Before you start with your ASP.NET tutorial, you most certainly would need to be familiar with either VB.NET or C# or both since both those languages are part of ASP.NET. People who are already familiar with either of the two languages, it would be much easier but the ones who are real beginner, I would recommend them to consult the C# book from A Press, authored by Dan Clark and named “C#-Object oriented Programming”. A few of my friends went on with their learning of C# with the help of that book and found it very helpful for complete beginners. And for someone who is already into programming languages like that of JAVA, C++ a different book from A Press called Pro C#5 authored by Andrew Troelsen would be beneficial.
Starting with ASP.NET
Once C# is properly known, it’s better to move on to the next level with ASP.NET. ASP.NET Model-View -Controller [MVC] is Microsoft’s open source platform and the thing it does best is to making your web development much easier than their previous technology called web forms. Their pattern is solely architectural that is there in existence since 1970’s/80’s.
According to me, the fastest you can grasp a technology is by getting to the high view of seeing how everything works. In our case, the best way to do that is to review the life cycle of an MVC web application by downloading it. That is almost everything you needed to know about mastering ASP.NET and I have put out a handout regarding this at for folks at my work.
In case if you are looking for some reading material, then all I can recommend to you is Prc ASP.NET MVC penned by Adam Freeman. I had this as an E-book at the same time when it was first published and since then been referring it to get back to the basic, if and whenever needed.
Online Training
For anyone who is into online learning and courses available therein, I would recommend them to go through Pluralsight. This is one website which has more than 1000 courses on almost everything, starting from vmobile, to web to virtualization. You need to pay a onetime fee of $30, if you do so, then I would recommend you to learn as much as you can.
Some of the courses from this website that I may highly recommend you is : “ASP.NET MVC 5 Fundamentals” by Scott Allen, “Automated ASP.NET MVC Testing: End to End” by Jason Roberts and “Architecting Applications for the Real World in .NET” by Cory House; Most of these above three courses won’t take more than 2-3 hours to complete. So, you need to make some free time for this and start learning them as soon as possible and as fast as possible.
Lastly, after acquiring all of that knowledge through books and Online courses, all you need to do now is to start building something out of that knowledge and make best use of it. All you need to do now is to see if you can make a ice web app. Let me give you a good idea to start with:-
Try to make a “to-do” list, “Building a contact list” and follow it up with a small blog. The advantage of following this approach to learn a languages is that you can apply this to learn virtually any language pretty fast and if you are familiar with languages and coding, then this makes things in a jiffy.
Apart from all of the above, there are some alternative free sources which you can use as well, to learn ASP.NET the fastest possible way. Among them includes the Microsoft Virtual Academy. This is one institution which has been serving students, professionals, developers, IT & Data professionals alike for a long time and has a very good ASP.NET tutorial as well.
There the top C# courses included the following:-
- Programming in C# A jumpstart
- C# Fundamentals for absolute beginners
- Introduction to ASP.NET MVC
- Introduction to ASP.NET 5
The best part of taking these courses from Microsoft Virtual Academy is that you can have part by part tests to check your learning process and then can get a certification from Microsoft upon completion of your course. The certification can be taken completely free of cost.
After finishing your learning process of ASP.NET what you will need next is to check out some open source projects already available in the public domain to try out a project for yourself. I will point out a few projects below which you can use to put to test your knowledge on the subject:
- Chess Game: Free MS chess game developed using ASP.NET
- Real time chat applications
- Advanced Business Applications assisting organizations such as University, Hospital, Company, Restaurants etc.
- Pro DInner application: These are applications to host dinners with multi-language support.
Conclusion
Lastly, with this ASP.NET tutorial in hand, I can safely say that learning languages and their application by writing codes in other languages will be easier gradually as you go on creating your own learning experiences yourself. Along the process, you must always remember that old wisdom which says, there is no alternative to hard work and dedication when it comes down to learning something.