Not Sure Where To Begin

[msagilliam1]

Hello DaniWeb Family!

I'm new to the site and to the industry so please be patient with me...smile!

I recently completed a 2-year community college program where I studied web development and the courses ran the gamut from Photoshop and Dreamweaver to VB, ASP.Net, C#, Javascript, and Java to Server 2008, SQL using Oracle, and Crystal Reports. What I'd like to do now is combine what I've learned over the past 2 years to complete a project on which I'm working. In the classses that I have taken, I learned to design a website in Photoshop and then build it in Dreamweaver. And I've written programs of varying complexities using the all of the languages mentioned above. But I feel like something is missing because don't quite know how to put it all together. For example, my mother is a caterer. I designed a prototype for her website in Photoshop and then created the pages in Dreamweaver. I've created menus and order forms in C# using Visual Studio to simplify the purchasing process for potential buyers. And I've even started building a database that contains her products, the pricing, and associated recipes. But all of this is segmented. This is an unfinished project that leaves me unfulfilled as I have all these pieces and I don't know how to put them together. How do I connect the pages that I've built in Dreamweaver to the order forms and menus created in C# and the database I created in Oracle? What environment to use to put them together? I'm not sure where to start...

[scottf22]

Sounds like you have everything you need to get the website running. I would take the HTML from dreamweaver web pages and paste it into asp.net web pages. You need ADO.Net to connect the database to the controls on the web page, this is depending on what you have in the DB of course. ADO.Net is built into ASP.Net so you don't need to go our and get anyting else. It is just a subset of database tools for interacting with the databse.

You can run Asp.Net from you computer to make sure the website is hooked to the database correctly and check out the web pages to see that they load properly in the browser.

You sound a bit overwhelmed at the moment. You need to break the task of "putting it all together" down in to small tasks that you need to do to get it out there.

My advice:
1) Spend more time with ASP.Net, create really simple web pages and understand how it works and see that it creates web pages in your browser

2) Move the HTML from Dreamweaver into ASP.Net web pages

3) Learn ADO.Net so you can to "talk" to your databae.

4) Learn how to debug your code and step through the code so you become familar with how it all hangs together.

5) When it all works on your machine, you need to move it to a hosted web server.

Step 5 is the last step and is were the web application will live. Many sites that host web sites have good tutorials on how to move your website to their servers. Your Mom may need a domain name like MyMomsCatereringBusiness.com so you tell people how to find and marvel at your app.

Don't worry we've all been there. All journeys begin with a single step, then you trip over and fall flat on your face ;-) Good luck.

[msagilliam1]

Hi Scott6,

I so appreciate you taking the time to give me details on how to break this task apart to really put things together. I felt like I had all the pieces but I just didn't know what to do with them to make things work.

I am not familiar with ADO.Net but I will be soon. I am going to read and watch every tutorial that I can find over the next few weeks on that subject matter and practice creating simple pages using ASP.Net like you suggested. I have a book, Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET 4 in 24 Hours, that I am going to dive into as well to practice creating ASP.NET web pages. I'm so curious to see the result when I copy and paste the code from Dreamweaver into an ASP.NET webpage. That wasn't something we did in school and so that's one of those little golden nuggets that just provides a whole new perspective on what I can do with the technology that I already own and know how to use. (We learned to do specific tasks in specific environments but we weren't instructed on or challenged to integrate them.)

Thank you again for the outline on how to approach this and for the encouragement. Great advice! I will keep you posted on my progress...

TO_BE_CONTINUED...smile!

[scottf22]

Hi,

I look forward to the updates.

One last thing, here is a site to get all of the free programming books you will need: http://it-ebooks.info/

Search on ASP.Net and ADO.Net

[msagilliam1]

Hi Scott6,

Thanks for that link! The site is a great resource. I've already downloaded a few books that's I'm going to work my way through.