Fast and practical introduction to C# and ASP.NET

Question

For a school project in database course, I need to create a basic career related web site. The web site will be very basic and it will basically be an interface for some database operations, listing, adding, etc. The main point in the project is database design and SQL; not fancy UI design, etc. The server side programming and web is just a medium(the resulting page will not be on web anyways, I will do the demo on my own laptop)

For the project, I have to use C# and ASP.NET. I haven't used any of them before. As for my background: I have quite a long history with C and C++; and know pretty much Java. Although I have used PHP for some time, I can say that I have negligible knowledge about server side programming. I do know enough SQL, though.

I don't have that much of a time to allocate for this project. So my question is: what are some to-the-point, fast and practical ASP.NET and C# resources for experienced programmers? What precisely and concisely do I need to know to get this done?

I will probably be using Visual C# 2010, but I'm open to any suggestions.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could sign up for a free trial subscription for the Pluralsight On-Demand library. There's a bunch of content to help you get started in there.

http://www.pluralsight-training.net/microsoft/

To be transparent, I record content for Pluralsight - but I would recommend them even if I didn't.

Also, there is a ton of great free stuff on http://www.asp.net

Answer 2

You should look into MVC Music Store. It's a step by step example of how to make a simple Music Store web site using C#, ASP.NET MVC and EF.

Answer 3

I would use Entity Framework to perform all of your database operations. That will save you tons of time.

Answer 4

You may be interested in the data scaffolding features Scott Guthrie highlights on his blog:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2011/05/05/ef-code-first-and-data-scaffolding-with-the-asp-net-mvc-3-tools-update.aspx