asp.net and MSSQL

[canadiangal]

Hello,
Does anyone know of an easiest/cost effective way to learn how to program in asp.net?
I would like to be able to update my website by myself, and add new features.
I called a local college here and they told me that I'll need to take 4 different courses that costs $755 each, and the course doesn't start until February.
I am not comfortable paying that much and/or waiting that long.
Please let me know of another way.
Cheers,
CG

 

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[fast_track_chaz]

Go to Home: The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site

A lot of free tutorials there. I used to go there a lot to post questions and watch videos on using asp.net

 

[maximus20895]

Does it have to be asp.net? PHP is open source unlikes Microsoft's asp.net and does pretty much the same thing. I would go as far as saying that php is used more than asp.net too.

 

[canadiangal]

I was pulled between the idea of using PHP/Mysql and asp.net/MSSQL and I finally decided to go with asp.net first of all because all similar sites to mine do use asp.net and also by some research results on google such as:
Debate – .NET V. PHP: Top 6 Reasons to Use .NET Article » SitePoint


1. Speed

Just like all .NET applications, ASP.NET applications are compiled. This makes them much faster than PHP, whose applications are interpreted. To achieve the same effect with PHP, Zend and PHP accelerator must be installed on the server, and this is rarely the case at most Web hosting companies. Also, OO is much faster in ASP.NET than it is in PHP.

2. More Language Support

ASP.NET is written using “real” OO (Object Oriented) programming languages of your choice. PHP is just a simple scripting language in comparison to .NET languages like C++, VB.NET or C# — languages that give you more control, and more reusability. That said, these languages are also harder to learn and master, and might be intimidating if you haven’t been programming for very long. ASP.NET, for example, can’t be picked up as easily as PHP, though C# is not very hard to learn if you already know PHP.

Another good thing about .NET is that it has multi-language support. You can currently write (or will be able to in the very near future) ASP.NET applications in C++, C#, Visual Basic.NET, Jscript.NET, Python, Perl, Java (J#), COBOL, Eiffel and Delphi. You may even find yourself writing your ASP.NET applications in PHP in the future — it’s not impossible!

What’s nice about this is that you can mix the code. can instantiate an object in C# from a class written in C++ or VB.NET. This increases the programmer hiring pool for companies, and improves your chances of finding a suitable pre-written class for your project on the Web.

3. Your Choice of Development Environments

This is an area where ASP.NET shines!

Microsoft has released a free development environment for ASP.NET called Web Matrix, which blows all other free development environments for PHP out of the water. It has a built-in Web server, database administration interface FTP integration, and more. Not only that, Microsoft has also released MSDE — a free development edition of MS SQL server. It has precisely all the features of the full MS SQL server 2000, and any application you write for MSDE will run fine on MS SQL Server.

If you can afford Visual Studio .NET, it, too, offers some amazing qualities. It allows you to:

automatically create reports and diagrams from your databases,
debug the code line by line, while at the same time seeing what happens in the application,
assign a temporary value to a variable in the middle of execution, in order to test out different scenario,
hover the cursor over variables in your code while debugging, to see what value they have “right now”,
…and much more.

4. It’s Part of .NET

ASP.NET is a part of .NET, and that benefit is too large to simply ignore. If you know how to write ASP.NET applications, you know how to write ordinary applications too. Even windows apps, if you read up a little on the Windows Forms classes (as opposed to the Web Forms). PHP has PHP-GTK, but it’s currently very immature compared to .NET.

5. It’s Cheaper to Develop for

Didn’t expect that one, did ya? It even surprised me! Due to the fact that ASP.NET is such a powerful application, and it’s offered for free (including the code editor, Web server, and FTP client), I actually ended up paying less ($0) than I did for my PHP Development Environment composed of UltraEdit ($35), Bullet Proof FTP ($30) and mySQLfront ($0). With that said, hosting ASP.NET is still more expensive than PHP.

6. It’s Cross-Platform

.NET is currently pretty much tied to the Windows platform. This is a bad thing, but I’m quite confident that .NET will become very cross-platform in a few years. Why? A while back, Microsoft released Rotor, a Shared Source implementation of the CLR (CLR = The thing that runs code) and most of the non-windows specific class libraries for Windows and BSD Unix, with source code for both. When I first heard this, I didn’t believe it — that REALLY didn’t sound like something Microsoft would do. And when I realized that it was in fact true, I expected Rotor to be the smallest and most feeble implementation Microsoft could possibly get away with.
I might have been wrong in my choice but many answers online have helped me decide on this.
What do you guys think?
Which one is better PHP or asp.net?

 

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[maximus20895]

Meh, seems kinda biased, but then again so am I. Go look on freelancer.com or some site like that there are far more people using PHP than asp.net. Ultimately, it's your choice though!

 

[canadiangal]

To tell you the truth, I don't know which is better.
Just reading about both right now.

 

[Icy]

More people use PHP because it's free, and the most widely used language for web development(this does NOT imply best).

If you don't have any foundation in either language, and can afford coughing up a bit more. money. .Net will make you life a whole lot easier than PHP for a huge amount of reasons.

That article definitely is biased towards .net though. Some of the stuff is quite untrue. For example cheaper.

 

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[maximus20895]

Yea, just keep looking and do some research and pick which one you like best.

 

[Milenko]

With most programmers language choice is like religion and politics - they have very strong opinions that are often more based on what they have experience with and not an unbiased look at reality. The language you choose is just a tool - it's the design patterns and architecture choices that make good programming not the language those things are implemented in. I'd pick a language like Javascript or PHP that has a low barrier to entry and tons of free educational material and just get in there and start learning. Once you learn that first language it makes picking up all the rest much easier.

 

[Jonleehacker]

I went to college, studied .net in all variations, got a job doing enterprise level systems in asp.net and vb.net.

But as soon as I started doing internet marketing, immediately switched to php/mysql.

One main reason, the workforce is about 1/10 of the cost. If you want to hire out programming in asp.net, you get people like me that expect to be well paid. But for php developers, since the platform is free and easy to learn, there are people who will work for much lower rates and still do top quality work.

Other than that, you can make the same things happen with both systems, although in my experience, php is more stable.

 

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[900]

It may not be that "cheap" to develop in anymore, but PHP/MySQL is potentially cheaper to deploy as you avoid Microsoft licenses, etc.

It's proven to be scalable, especially since very large companies like Facebook or big parts of Yahoo have used (and in many parts still using) PHP, and they've helped build tools and contributed to PHP's growth a great deal over the years, to help insure they can keep growing with PHP.

But as someone already mentioned, there's no "right" answer. It's whatever works for you and you're comfortable with.