Some difficulties of learning ASP.NET

Difficulties 1: Tools
Say, in your company, you are using Visual Studio 2003 and in order to improve your skill, you want to put give more time to learn it at home. But, the problem is you do not have Visual Studio 2003 at home. You went to check and realize that there is one which is free called Visual Web Developer 2005, but it is for ASP.NET 2.0 only.

Solution: Not found yet. (I think I’ll just learn ASP.NET 2.0 at home while in office, I will learn ASP.NET 1.1)

Side-point about ASP.NET framework and Visual Studio IDE:

IDE			Free light version IDE
Visual Studio .NET 2002	Requires 1.0 ASP.NET Framework *	Supports 1.0 ASP.NET Framework only	Not available
Visual Studio .NET 2003	Requires 1.1 ASP.NET Framework	Supports 1.1 ASP.NET Framework only	Not available
Visual Studio .NET 2005	Requires 2.0 ASP.NET Framework	Supports 2.0 ASP.NET Framework only	Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
Visual Studio 2008	Requires 3.5 ASP.NET Framework	Supports 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 ASP.NET Framework (2.0 and 3.0 ASP.NET Framework will automatically be installed)	Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition **

* During the earliest version of ASP.NET, in some places, you might not see the version number. Instead they just put ASP.NET. But this is actually refering to ASP.NET 1.0 version.

** You might bound into different terms like Visual Studio Express Edition instead of Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. This is my understanding. An analogy to explain the word “Studio” is by using Microsoft Office. Under Microsoft Office, there are Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. This “Studio” is like Microsoft Office. So, to be more clear and organized, Visual Studio Express Edition consists of:

Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition

Visual Basic (.NET) 2008 Express Edition

Visual C# 2008 Express Edition

Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition

SQL Server 2008 Express Edition

Difficulties 2: Terms
(You already gotten some confusing terms from above.)

Certains terms in ASP.NET could be quite confusing. And seems like those to come out with this terms, do not realize this problem. Otherwise, there will be more articles and diagrams to clear up this confusion.

Example: ASP.NET vs .NET Framework vs ASP.NET Framework vs .NET? For my knowledge right know, they all are refering to the same thing.

More examples: dataset, datagrid, gridview, dataadapter, datareader, datatable, dataview, detailsview, datalist, formview and repeater. Some terms remain the same from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0, but some are new terms from .NET 2.0.

Solution: The second diagram at the bottom at this page helps to clear up some of the above terms.

---

Lastly, please correct me if I got any inaccurate information here. Thanks in advance.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio_Express

Server Application Error

Don’t know why suddenly when I run an ASP file from my local IIS, I got an error message saying

Server Application Error

The server has encountered an error while loading an application during the processing of your request. Please refer to the event log for more detail information. Please contact the server administrator for assistance.

So, I googled about it and tried out one of the solutions suggested. I went to DOS command and type iisreset.

Then, I went back to my IIS to browse the ASP file and it works now!

Reasons for database de-normalization

Consider this case, your site is an e-commerce site and your customer has placed and confirm an order. You don’t need to normalize this table because the data for this table should not be changed (edit or delete). This design provides two advantages:

Data Integrity (Security). Changes of data in other tables will not affect the master table.

Performance. When you join with many tables, performance will be affected.

Other examples when to denormalize: financial transaction, audit log and statistic.

References

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/08/03/WhenNotToNormalizeYourSQLDatabase.aspx