Visual C# 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 Bootcamp, Day 2

Day 2 of my bootcamp went significantly better than day 1. The instructor started us off with a pop quiz covering the material we learned yesterday, which I aced thanks to my continued review at home last night after class. The only item from yesterday that I'm still struggling with is Exceptions and Exception Handling, but I spent about an hour in lab today trying to gain a better understanding of exception handling through applying it to the simple webpage I created

After we finished reviewing the basic concepts of development in the .NET framework (a final, more detailed look at the principles of Inheritance - Inheritance rocks, by the way!), we took a dive into web development by creating and adding functionality to a web form. A lot of this is very similar to creating a windows form and adding functionality, but a large difference comes into play when you look at the code behind the app, which can include C#, HTML, and Javascript. Visual Studio is helpful in that it renders all your C# code to HTML for you (web browsers only read HTML), but if you only write in C# (a "server-side" language, as it is called), your application's performance will be greatly reduced in its ability to communicate efficiently with the browser.

In order to accomodate for this, most developers use the HTML toolset and write much of their code in Javascript, since it translates/communicates more efficiently with the browser. Unfortunately for me, that means I need to outright learn Javascript, and need to gain proficiency in understanding and writing HTML.

My major success for the day was creating a website using a Master Page (basically a template that keeps a standardized look and feel on all pages of a website, and allows you to update the look and feel of the entire website with one code change rather than changing the code on each individual page), User Controls (smaller blocks of code and UI that can be re-used throughout the website and all updated as a group with one code change), links to and between all of the different pages I created, classes, methods, exception handling for user inputs, and basic UI design. I was pretty darned proud of myself when I finished that in the lab today, and I came home from class feeling like I made great progress in applying what I've learned so far. I am very excited to see what I learn and apply in class tomorrow!