Most of the college students who are working on their final year projects (especially computer science students) and beginners are generally asked the following questions:

  • What are the basic Software I need to code .NET
  • What are the things I need to start an ASP.NET Project.
  • What are the books I referred to become a better.NET programmer.

In this post I just want to guide those people by providing some basic tips.

Prerequisite Skills

The following are the must have skill sets required for every beginner in ASP.NET

  1. .Net Architecture (CLR and BaseClass Library).
  2. C# or VB.Net Language.
  3. ADO.Net.
  4. ASP.Net (Web Form, Worker Process, AppDomain, Session, Cache, Authentication etc).

It is better how .NET frameworks works that helps the developer to grasp the rest of the things easily. If you want to go with ASP.NET you should learn any one of the .NET compatible languageS such as C# or VB.Net. ADO.NET always deals with database related objects such as Datasets, Datatables, etc. At the beginner level, choosing a Web Form will give an easy to move way in ASP.NET. The above lists are specific to .NET.

Prerequisite Software

Before starting your project you need the following software, that needs to be installed in your machine:

1. Visual Studio
2. .Net Framework
3. SQL Server
For students and beginners, the express version of Visual Studio is enough. You can download Visual Studio 2013 Express for web development here. With that installation, .NET framework 4.5 is also installed, so separate download is not necessary.

In the meantime, Microsoft introduced Visual Studio Community Edition that is a complete set of IDE. Instead of going with Express Edition, you can try it. Start download it from here.

Each and every website developed are data centric or data driven. That means data is stored and retrieved from a database like SQL Server. So you must need that one also. For SQL Server also, Microsoft provides express edition. You can get SQL Server 2008 Express with SP2 here and SQL Server 2012 here.

For the above software installed you must need Windows 7 with SP1 or Windows 8.

Some Good Books for ASP.Net

The following are my personal suggestions to sharpen your skills in ASP.NET as well as .NET languages such as C# and VB.NET:

  1. Programming ASP.NET By Dino Espotio (From Microsoft Press).
  2. Professional ASP.Net 2.0/3.5/4.5 (from wrox publications).
  3. C# 4.0 – The Complete Reference By Herbert Schildt.
Online Tutorials & Trainings for ASP.NET

For ASP.NET technology, there are so many good online tutorial sites available. Some of them are listed here for your reference:

  1. www.asp.net/getstarted
  2. http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/1/224/Asp-Net-programming.aspx
  3. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/
  4. http://channel9.msdn.com/Tags/asp.net

What do you think

The above are my personal experiences that I have earned overtime. If you want to give some suggestions, please let me know through comments.