Tuesday, April 20, 2010

NerdDinner for ASP.NET MVC 2.0

I'll be upfront. I'm a web noob. Don't get me wrong. I can look at HTML and CSS and figure out how it works, but I've been living in the C#.NET Windows Forms world for some time now and I need a change. I want to jump in. The question is, where? Well, right now what looks hottest to me is ASP.NET MVC 2.0. The problem is that this technology came out like last week and there are no good tutorials out there to get me up to speed.
I've been on the ASP.NET website and there is this kick butt tutorial called NerdDinner that builds an awesome website. I like it because it walks you through a project. That is how I learn best; by putting things into action. But there are two problems. One, it was written using ASP.NET MVC 1.0. That was so 9 months ago! And it shows, because problem #2: it's using LINQ to SQL. Rumor has it, that Microsoft is giving that technology the snub and is moving on to the Entity Framework. As somebody who's always liked having all my logic at the database level, I'm still trying to get my head around how and if that is going to change my game. But that's another issue. I want to see Entity in action.
So what I've ventured to do in my spare time is to follow the NerdDinner tutorial but do it in ASP.NET MVC 2.0 using the Entity Framework and anything else that is "cutting edge". I'm still in process, but as I find, process, and learn new things, I thought I'd post them and then perhaps post my final code. If there is anybody else doing this, I'd like to know.

More to come...