I can never buckle down to writing code (tho' I am looking seriously at vbs & DesktopX)- but this site might be worth a look-see.

Link

It's Code Newbie and has various forums for different computer languages. There are a few basic tutes and I have always found it to be a friendly place.

I use http://www.asp.net/ alot.

Ive never used php, but is there any kind of editor for php kinda like visual studio for .net? Becuase VS.NET helps alot in coding. Also does php have built in controls? I know asp.net does and you can build your own.

ASP.NET hasnt been out as long as php has it? Maybe thats why there arnt as many resources out.

PHP has an editor called Zend Studio. It's a great tool and makes my life a lot easier when doing PHP work. As far as controls? No, there aren't really any built-in controls in the same way as what ASP has. But to be honest, I think most of those controls get in the way of what you're really trying to do. The table controls? God those things make me want to scream!

Yeah, PHP has been around longer, but even when comparing the official manuals of each online, the PHP one is far and above better simply because it provides actual examples of how a given function or command works. We're using the PHP reference manual style as a model to fashion an information resource site where I work.

The response to Part 1 here was better than I could have possibly expected. I was given a very simple answer to what I thought was a complex problem based on what every ASP.NET help site out there told me. What my ASP.NET book told me was a page and a half of code to do, a helpful reader (mick_k) showed me was really just one line. I'm a huge fan of collaboration and seeking out knowledge and advice from a community... it makes everyone's life so much easier when they hit a roadblock.

Very true. This is why I advocate so much for people to have links to favorite articles and posts. It might be a little awkward, but you can search a few user sites to see some real helpful article favorites on their sites.

Your writing about what your going through when the need arises to switch from PHP to ASP.NET is also very helpful to those in the future who might go through the same thing.


This is also why I really want people to be more interactive with the site and why I write those user page articles.


Anyway, that was sort of off topic...

Latly ive been developing in coldfusion, but visual studio does create alot of generated code (which i hate), made me almost stop making asp.net sites. I had to switch to dreamweaver, there asp.net became solid to me.

One thing that i liked about about coldfusion is the fuse actions, which made templates possible. Ive yet to make or see anything like that in asp.net 1.1, I know asp.net 2.0 has master files that make it possible. Does php have somthing where you can make one file as the default layout and you can make pages that are included but just telling a different query string, for exmaple...

yada.com?index.cfm?page=main
yada.com?index.cfm?page=second

yeah, you can house all of the content and non-formatting code in an include file, and at the head of the main page, have a simple if statement that checks passed page variables, then picks the proper content file. Very simple.

MSDN has most of the code resource you could need.

I learned the basics of PHP from a Link very well-written tutorial. Had to adapt a couple things, as the article was written for PHP3 (register_globals comes readily to mind....) but it showed the basic parts of PHP (the C/Java and HTML background I have helped a lot) and interaction with MySQL (which was completely new to me). After I mastered everything in that short tutorial, I used PHP.net to find any other functions/info I needed. Using all of that, I coded a nicely-featured, database-driven imageboard for my high school, in addition to several other PHP sites.

Yes, PHP DOES seem to have a lot more on-line resources than ASP.NET, which, I think, should probably be the way around...

I myself am a Perl coder, but in the process of learning PHP and ASP.NET. Having been coding in Perl for such a long time, PHP really seems simple, while ASP.NET, on the contrary, is a bit confusing to me.

Really, dynamic web page is very easy: user provides data through a form then submit, script takes the code and rips off all the fields, manipulate a little bit then spit it out. I just don't understand why Microsoft wants to make it so complicated! ...Oh well, that's my own problem I guess.

Also, I've noticed that for the same action, ASP.NET seems to take a little bit longer time than PHP and Perl. I tried to optimize my code but doesn't seem to be effective. I'm not sure but I hope this is not a nature of it...

this http://www.codeproject.com/ has some great stuff for asp.net also

Well my favorite resource for PHP is my PHP Instructor but not everyone can take a Cal Berkeley Online class. I do however recommend his book. Both of the Visual Quickstart (and Visual Quickpro) guides for PHP by Larry Ullman are great. Also the PHP Pocket reference is a must. I also find devshed to be useful for finding how tos on many things.

I'm sure PHP has a ton of resources and live examples due to it's nature of being open source right? Or maybe i'm wrong.

Well, let me tell you the #1 "thing" i like about asp.net, and maybe you PHP people can tell me if there is something equivelant.

Caching technologies.
By Simply caching data server side our server is allowed to breath a little bit better now by simply caching certain types of data for merely 1 minute at a time and with a higher profile site, that cached data can be hit hundreds of thousands of time before actually going back to the database to re-cache things.

Asp.net also allows cache callbacks or should i say vb.net and C#. This feature compliments caching because i can do such things like when a cached item expires, a callback will fire and i can have the code automatically refill itself. So theorhetically, the user should never have to wait for a live query to fire, it should just be pulling the data from memory.

Another side feature of asp.net i like is the fact of managed code. So, if one portion of my team likes to write in C#, another in C++ (written in the .net framework), and the rest in vb.net, i can link to their libraries with little effort. I'm sure php has some of these things or similar things built in.

And i will say this, and maybe not be agreed upon by many, but i love visual studio .net. Debugging a web application to me is priceless. I don't have to do things like writing print statements everywhere to see how well my code is running then having to worry if i have any of them left behind. Does php have this? if so that's great. Break points, stepping in and out of methods to me makes the development process much easier and honestly keeps me sane more than half the time. Now i know what your thinking which is "well just write it right the first time and you don't need to debug!" yea great theory, but i am not that seasoned enough to write flawlessly!

The msdn is also easily accessable once installed. Simply highligthing some text then hitting F1 and having explinations and code examples has helped quite a bit.


That's my 2 cents on asp.net as well as the tools provided. Hopefully this helps those who are thinking of getting into it!

Flyin

Flyin's right, ASP.net has some big advantages in caching technologies.

I tent to agree with Zoomba, however in that .NET lacks really really solid tutorials and code examples for the novice .NET coder like myself. I've found it to be more the frustrating learning this particular language on my own. I'm not a guy who loves asking others around me for advice on how to do something (even though this might be the logical solution), so learning a new language like .NET can be quite time consuming. Often, in reality, you can't just ask the guy next to you what the solution is, so you have to rely on some other forms of research. I've found many dead-ends in doing research, only to find that what I wanted to do isn't as possible as I once hoped to do, or it would take a really long time (and some more learning) to do quickly. Most of the time, I’m not even sure where to start, or if the technology even exists to do it.

Hopefully, this will change in time as more and more developers embrace .net technologies, and communities begin reaching out to new .net developers in hopes of answer some of life’s most difficult questions... with real world examples.

George

The biggest problem with having a lack of good resources is people revert back to bad habits learned in other languages. For example, the ASP.NET controls make so little sense to me for displaying table content depending on whether or not certain variables are "true", hiding if "false" that I'm cheating completely by building all of my HTML on the fly within my C# code by putting it all in a series of strings then displaying the string variables with <%=var%> in the HTML. I know it's the wrong way to be doing it, but for the sake of speed (which is important to me right now) it's the way I'm going.

If in the future I puzzle out the table stuff, I'll go back and redo my current application so it is done right. But there's so little of actual use out there to help me, it may be quite a while.

(not sure about all of this...) PHP can do caching, but it has to be coder-implemented; not an automatic thing. For example, one method would be to output an HTML file every 2 hours (or whatever time you choose) and load that instead of grabbing everything from the database again. I know there are better methods for caching in PHP that do exist, but I'm afraid I don't know much about it.