About to start a web app... coming from a Scala and Java background, but my web hoster offers me php and asp.net -- which poison is tastier? I was set to go for php, although I don't like the language much. So I thought I'd give this asp.net stuff a try.
For my first timid steps, I was happy to have read the German Wikipedia entry, and the
beginning wikibook "Webentwicklung mit ASP.NET". This had a link to visual studio web express, which is free, and it rocks as an IDE (I am a big fan of Microsoft IDEs, although I do everything to avoid owning a Windows OS). I get curious about MonoDevelop, all this Emacs juggling is getting boring sometimes.
About asp.net proper, the difference in complexity seems ridiculous compared to php... but this is more a psychological thing. While I quickly hacked a phpinfo.php to test that scripts were properly executed on the server, asp.net development first started by installing an IDE. There are quite some concepts to learn, and here I lost interest. Compared to the jsp world, the "usine à gaz" factor seems the same (I also lost interest in JSP 2, my last activity was a struts-1 webapp).
Out of curiosity, I will try to connect to the mysql database on asp.net, and continue some experiments... and if that works fine, I might stick with it and get used to IDE land again.
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Growing up in Germany, I have at least one seen a show called "computer club" - although I was too young to appreciate it back then. Apparently, they have recently started podcasting on their new site cczwei. It's fun to listen to this professionally produced piece of audio-layman-tech-journalism - for one who enjoys people talking about technical things in a simple manner.
