Hi

I am new to web design and I have enjoyed learning the basics of divs, css xhtml etc, however I can see that static HTML pages are not the way of the future, so I was thinking of learning ASP.NET, Is this the best solution out there for server side scripting.

Why should I use ASP.NET rather than say PHP?

I also looked at Visual Studio Express 2005.

Should I learn C# or Visual Basic in the first instance?

Thanks

David
 

 

 

Personally I prefer ASP/ASP.NET since that is what I started with and find it easier to use than PHP. Others prefer PHP usually because they started out with open source. It doesn't really matter which you choose since both are widely supported and once you learn one programming language it is relatively easy to add a second, third, etc.

My preference is VB.NET but again it is because I started with Classic ASP which uses VBScript (not the same but similar) while others perfer C#. Some of the C# folks get rather snobbish thinking that it is a "better" language but that's talking through their hat. ;-)

I think the tools for ASP.NET are easier to use than those for PHP but again that's a personal preference which is really what it comes down to.

Hi Cheryl Thanks for the tips, I think once I have got to grips with CSS & HTML, I will go for ASP.NET then.

However I have food for thought regarding the C# or VB option because up till now things I had seen about it certainly had the C# is simply the best attitude, you are the first person I have read saying otherwise, so thanks for that as I liked the look of VB.NET.

David
 

Go look at some of the VB.NET groups and you will see there are a lot of people using it. Many of which could just as easily have chosen to use C#. I can read and edit C# but prefer to work in VB.NET. It really is a personal choice just like chosing an OS or browser.

One thing to note when choosing a server-side language to learn: if you don't self-host, you may find that many clients register webspace themselves (as has often been my experience), and significantly more web hosts support PHP than ASP.net.

Finding hosts that support ASP.NET isn't difficult. The difficulty is more with which version of ASP.NET they support. Many of them still haven't updated to 2.0 which is significantly better than 1 or 1.1.