Asp.net Evening Courses Dublin?

gerryR

Hi All

I did a bit of programming in college (bout 5 years ago now!) and liked it. I ended up veering off towards IT Support though and have been doing that for the past few years.

I'd like to get back into programming and have sorta set my mind on asp.net. I will also need to learn either c# or vb as part of that.

What I'm wondering is if anyone knows of any good evening courses on these languages? I dont really want a 4 day course that trys to cram too much in, I have no problem attending evening courses for a year or so if it will give me a good understanding of the subject.

I'm trying to do this at home but have realised I don't have the self motivation to do that (too many distractions!).

Appreciate any suggestions
gerryR

Evil Phil

Personally I would go with C# over vb.net. Having worked with both C# will generally make you more money. Also, and this is a personal opinion which I'm going to get flamed for, the standard of coding done in C# is way above the standard for Vb.net.

Google 'C# evening classes' for Ireland. I know you have already but this thread has the highest page rank

gerryR

Hi Phil

Thanks for the reply,

The reason I was looking at vb.net was I've done a small bit of vb scripting and vba in work and will probably do so again so I assume sticking with the VB family would help me with these (if only in terms of syntax etc)

One thing I forgot to add, maybe I'm being foolish but I'd really like the course not to be based on using visual studio.

I appreciate your feedback, any other tips are appreciated.

By the way, the top hit for me was nightcourses.com but the courses there didn't mention asp at all.

Thanks again
Gerry

Evil Phil

Nightcourses.com does seem to have a few distance learning courses but they're all Visual Studio .Net based. TBH you're probably not going to find a course that isnt' based around VS. Why don't you want to use it?

gerryR

Yeah even from looking at books they all seem VS based although I did find a good book asp.net 2.0 unleashed that doesn't seem to use VS. I'm looking for a course that does the same if possible.

Saw this course from a crowd at nightcourses.com http://www.acsedu.co.uk/Courses/Information-Technology/PROFICIENCY-AWARD-IN-COMPUTER-PROGRAMMING-VIT008-409.aspx and just fired off a few questions (like is it worth crap in terms of the employers eyes) But I guess even if its not it should be enough to get me started.

One reason why I'd like not to use VS is I learned HTML without the likes of Dreamweaver, now when I use dreamweaver if I have a problem (something doesn't look right or I want to tweek something) I can easily go into code view and do what I need to. I know people who only know Dreamweaver and they have while they have knowledge of the code behind its no where near as much as if they learned from code 1st. If this is not possible I'll go the VS route.

Thanks Phil
gerryR

Evil Phil

In VS you have the choice between the WYSWIG view (or whatever its called now) and the raw markup view, the markup is where your HTML goes along with the Aspx markup. Most web developers prefer working with the markup view. Then you have the code behind which is your C#/vb.net code, this sits in a different file from the markup. Its not quite the same as dreamweaver.

The course looks good, I particularly like that work experience is required to pass. Is the certificate recognised over here though? FETAC should be able to answer that question.

You could also have a look at Fás, that have an online course which is microsoft certified. Given the choice between the two though, if I was hiring, I think I'd go for your course.

gerryR

I've fired up VS a few times but never got too far with it so I guess I'll have to give it a go before knocking it. I assume you would have to pick up a good understanding of the code using VS anyway?

If I was going with that course I'd probably opt for the project as opposed to the work experience as I'm currently in full time employment. Saying that I have a few projects in mind that would be benificial to the company anyway.

I've sent the details onto Fetac and asked if the course would be recognised over here, thanks for the suggestion. Even if it wasn't, at least it should give me some good experience with asp etc.

Thanks again for all the advice Phil

Gerry

John_Mc

gerryR wrote: »

I've fired up VS a few times but never got too far with it so I guess I'll have to give it a go before knocking it. I assume you would have to pick up a good understanding of the code using VS anyway?

If I was going with that course I'd probably opt for the project as opposed to the work experience as I'm currently in full time employment. Saying that I have a few projects in mind that would be benificial to the company anyway.

I've sent the details onto Fetac and asked if the course would be recognised over here, thanks for the suggestion. Even if it wasn't, at least it should give me some good experience with asp etc.

Thanks again for all the advice Phil

Gerry

I used to code in ASP.net 1.1 with VB using Dreamweaver. I then started using Microsoft Visual Web developer and eventually began using Visual studio 2005.

There was a slight learning curve to transitioning from Dreamweaver, but it just just a case of getting used to a different way of doing things. I knew what to do, just not how to actually do it. Within a few days I was happy because of the far tighter integration between .net & HTML than is provided by Dreamweaver. In design view, the preview pages render the .net controls accurately and this makes styling & layout a lot easier. There's also loads of UI's for common tasks in VS which makes things a lot easier.

I don't believe Dreamweaver provides these UI's, at least it didn't in the version I used a few years back.

You're making it unnecessarily difficult for yourself by not using Visual Studio

gerryR

cheers John, VS it is I think!

chabsey

gerryR wrote: »

cheers John, VS it is I think!

I use VS all the time and I know what you mean about getting lazy about development and not knowing what to do when your drag-and-drop panel doesn't render exactly as you want. Thing is, I NEVER use the WYSIWYG aspects of VS, it's too slow and doesn't render properly (VS 2005 anyway).

So, as far as I'm concerned you're more less forced into using hand coding combined with the lovely aspects of intellisense in the editor. The once nice aspect of the design view is that it makes rendering tedious things like the 'onclick' event of a button a doddle, but aside from that I'd stay away.

Ginger

Have a look at the videos from ASP.NET http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/

They will probably help you out a lot

G-Money

Just regarding the C# versus VB argument, I think I have to go in favour of C#. I started out using VB a number of years ago and while its easy to learn, I think it's also easy to pick up a lot of bad habits, at least in earlier versions, I'm not sure how much it's changed over the last few years.

C# seems to force you somewhat into better programming IMHO. VB I think would let you code something up and compile it without any errors but when you ran it, it would crash at some point (code was trying to use the value of a variable and the variable never had a value to begin with for example). I think C# won't compile the code for you in these situations and it makes you write the thing properly.

Not being an expert developer I'm sure there are lots of other reasons why it's better that I'm not aware of, but from my beginner perspective, I feel like I make less mistakes with C# than I did with VB.

Regarding the VS/Dreamweaver thing when using ASP.net. I downloaded a Dreamweaver trial and while I didn't spend ages using it, I kind of found it difficult to use. The main problem I had was that I just wanted to create a basic website with one graphic on it to test it out. Yet the publishing feature of Dreamweaver seemed to ask for the same location a few times. It seemed that no matter what I tried I couldn't get it to publish the page locally.

In the end I just gave up and tried something similar with VS. It seemed to run much easier, I added whatever I wanted to the page and clicked Publish and it worked first time. However the intial downside I found to VS is that sometimes the controls don't appear correctly when the page gets published, although that could simply be my settings or something. The other thing I found was that no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to add a graphic to the page. I dropped an image control and using the properties window, I would use the Image source browser to select it, but for some reason the image would never appear in the dialog so I couldn't add it or select it. I tried copying the file into multiple locations and nothing seemed to work.

I've seen that before and it's probably something I'm doing wrong but I'm surprised how tricky it was.

What I do like about VS is that you can just drop the controls onto the page, double-click and code it straight away, just like you would a Windows Forms application.

I can understand why you might be interested in writing the raw code and knowing how that works and I definitely think it has it's place. For me though, I'm more interested in doing the dev and making the thing do what I want, rather than messing around with code that decides how many pixels appear on the corner of a dialog or something

Ginger

grandmaster wrote: »

C# seems to force you somewhat into better programming IMHO. VB I think would let you code something up and compile it without any errors but when you ran it, it would crash at some point (code was trying to use the value of a variable and the variable never had a value to begin with for example). I think C# won't compile the code for you in these situations and it makes you write the thing properly.

Ahh the famous on error resume next issues! Should never be allowed in code at all.. Had a small war removing it from an old VB6 project.

VB.NET wont compile if the object is not initialized correctly nor will C#.

Any language will allow you to pick up bad habits because at the start you are more interested in getting it to work rather than writing elegant code. Its just a fact of life.

Even within a language when you are doing something for the first time say using a new part of the framework you will just apply the basics make it work and then come back and tidy up (that is the hope anyways!)