Alright, I've been given a project at work to take a project management process (how to scale down our massive project methodology to fit projects of varrying sizes) and build an automated tool that asks a Project Manager a series of questions about their project, and spits out an evaluation and set of suggestions as to how best scale the methodology. It should also output this all in a mini-manual word document.
Well, cool I thought, I know PHP, I know I can do this easily in PHP and get it done rather quickly. Well, we don't support PHP here, so that's out. My options left are to either code a complete application, try to force excel to do odd things, or use ASP.NET. I personally like the web-based application idea as it means I don't have to bother with building all the code to handle menus, button clicks etc... I can just throw up some HTML and let the browser do the heavy lifting. So it looks like I'll be doing it with ASP.NET
Problem is, I'm not a coder in any real sense. I've done a bit for college courses, and a little bit to entertain myself when I had nothing else to do, but I've never done anything larger than a small tool (and that was in PHP anyway). Now, my only dev experience is with C++, Java and PHP. I've never touched a MS dev language or dev tools. No VisualXYZ for me (though this was mainly due to the fact that I couldn't afford their tools... the others were free). I haven't the first clue as to where to start learning ASP.NET, or which language to use in conjunction with it (I know at least that ASP.NET itself is a tech as opposed to a language and you use one of the other MS languages to code in).
I now throw myself at the feet of the real coders and software developers who use this site. Where do I start with all of this? Tools? Books? Preferred caffinated drink when on a coding binge... anything that can help me get rolling.
Thanks
-Mike