.NET challenged... at least that's what my therapist said.

[DevDevil]

Hopefully I will be welcomed to this discussion. I'm a little intemidated by cscgirl... not really. I'm relatively new to .NET, but I've been developing for about 5 years. I don't have any major projects under my belt that haven't been destroyed by new webmasters. I'm realizing that .NET is very different from ASP. Kind of the same, but different. I have a potential project to start in the near future that I could just use the same old ASP that I've been using but I really think it would be better in ASP.NET. It has the possibility of being a very lucrative deal so I want to do it right. I have been using Visual Studio .NET for about 1.5 years, but only recently started looking at this new stuff. I'm still having trouble with things like connecting to my SQL Server, and I need to create a very strong login form, and then retrieve data as well as create new records, and update existing ones. All this is second nature to me in ASP, but I'm not wanting to go that route. I also need to be able to output a report into a word.doc, or a pdf. How hard is this in ASP.NET? If I get the gig I would be willing to pay someone(a lot) to help me do it right as long as I get to learn while it's being developed. It would help if there was someone in Houston. I'm actually trying to build a sample app to present to the client right now, and I've got a headache. Is there a good source of code samples that I could get started with that shows conn strings, inserts, updates, deletes, etc...? Once I see things working I pick up quickly.

[InstantASP Ltd]

There are a number of community startkits available at

http://www.asp.net/Default.aspx?tabindex=6&tabid=41

These all demonstrate the basic concepts. With regards to creating PDF's a great free library exists for .NET on sourceforge :)

[Tekmaven]

The free pdf library, in my opinion, is not for beginers. All I do is .NET work, and I would say I'm good at it... and I had to really look at their source to see what the heck they were talking about sometimes.

If you do use it, just remember, the size units are in Picas.. that took me a week to figure out LOL.