ASP.NET here we come

I'm going to start posting some blog notes on ASP.NET among other things to help you guys (my awesome 3rd year ELCM students at Vic Uni) get familar with the technology really quickly. I'm a firm believer in keeping things simple and we should use this approach when developing web applications.

For those that don't know, Wikipedia is a great way to get a quick (and usually accurate) summary on any word/concept/whatever. So its a great start for getting some knowledge on ASP.NET. ASP was the first server side scripting language I learnt back in 2000. I then switched to the Java camp using JSP and then on to servlets which has done everything I've needed to since. For the last 4 years I've only really built Flash based applications & websites so getting response data in XML format only was the norm. I think using a Service Orientated Architecture is great and separating back end programming from front end development is the way to go..(more on this some other time).

So you'll notice there have been numerous releases of ASP. ASP.NET 2.0 is the current release. I think this course primarily teaches ASP.NET 1.0 using Visual Studio 2003. I'll need to check how we can get you guys using 2.0 ASAP as there is nothing worse that working with outdated technology particularly with server side languages. Those AJAX controls for 2.0 look especially cool. I'll see what I can do.

We can however do remote procedure calls without using AJAX - here's an easy example