Learning C#, ASP.NET 3.5 - what order should I learn in / what to skip? [closed]

Question

There's a lot to C# & ASP.net. Where should I start? What should I not bother focusing on?

Should I learn Winforms then WPF? Ditto for webforms / Silverlight? Should I learn ASP.MVC or classic ASP.NET? If both, which first?

In the either/or cases - which will make more sense having known the other first?

What major .NET feature(s) should I learn upfront that will open the doors of understanding to what lies ahead?

I am deliberately not mentioning fundamentals like value / reference Types, Classes, object-oriented concepts, etc since they should come first, before specifics. Here, I am interested in specifics.

[edit - added detail of what my goals are] Good points raised - "what do I want to write"?

Basically, an intranet application that monitors a set of documents and implements a workflow as a change control process. The app will also audit the documents and report problems, self-correcting common errors. A lot of the parameters will need to be end-user definable and pluggable. The document format needs to be adaptable to different proprietary formats although they are fundamentally the same. The app will be very modular.

I'm leaning towards a web interface because the client specs & admin rights will vary - a browser is really the only thing I can count on.

As you can see, it's a bit of everything.

Answer 1

What do you want to write? If you want to write a Windows client-side app, look into WinForms and WPF (no real need to learn WinForms before WPF, other than the way that a lot of tutorials/books will probably compare WPF concepts with WinForms concepts). If you're looking at a web app, then ASP.NET or ASP.MVC - I don't know whether you really need the "normal" ASP.NET before MVC.

Silverlight is a bit of both, in a way - rich client probably talking to a server for interesting data etc.

Before learning any of these though, I suggest you learn the fundamentals which are one step up from the topics you mentioned - things like how text works in .NET (including encodings and regular expressions), I/O, perhaps threading. Oh, and LINQ :) There are a few books which are very good on this front:

• C# 3.0 in a Nutshell
• CLR via C#
• Accelerated C# 2008

Answer 2

I had the same question when I moved from Classic ASP to .NET 2.0... .NET is huge: so where should I start?

What i did was put my hand dirty and started slow, take a project (in my case was a very important project - a finance web app that would cover and automatize all 4 persons work) and start to implement, every time I didn't know how to accomplish something or I had an idea in ASP but not in ASP.NET I would go to www.asp.net or 4GuysFromRolla website and search for examples, copy/paste, understand what I was doing and ... continue to the next wall.

Took me 6 month to have everything up and running but was worst it! now that passed almost 3 years I know I did the right choice but back then ... I was scared!

now... you refer .NET 3.5, it has a bunch of new things like extensions, linq, etc... I would go by the simple part and when the times comes, "maybe I can use LINQ here, let me search how to use it on this part"

hope you follow your own path and buy some reference book so you can read something new and have a reference whenever you need "ahhh, I read this somewhere in the book, let me search... where was it?"

I bought Professional ASP.NET from Wrox as a reference book, and even today I go there to see new things, even when I'm started to use .NET 3.5, the idea is there, there is only a new way to accomplishing it.