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Just moving from Visual Studio 2005 webforms to 2010. Bit confused of lately about what to learn on the new version. I will just be doing web applications only

  1. Should I learn entity framework or MVC framework for my new applications moving from simple webforms?

  2. What would you guys advice to learn as top priority moving to Visual Studio 2010 which will benefit me the most?

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Asp.NET MVC (+ Razor) is amazingly simple and elegant compared to WebForms. And I started my first MVC project only few weeks ago. I won't touch WebForms anymore :). – sabiland Oct 6 '11 at 9:59
Is it true that MVC applications take a huge amount of time to build then webforms ? – Damien Joe Oct 6 '11 at 10:05
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From what I've seen in those few weeks (I rewrote (from scratch) my own home-page from WebForms to MVC) - I would say on the contrary. But you should wait for some MVC expert to express his opinion. – sabiland Oct 6 '11 at 10:17
Ok, thanks for the info sabi. – Damien Joe Oct 6 '11 at 11:24
Razor generates much more beautiful output than the old ways... – Rig Mar 25 '12 at 2:20

3 Answers

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There are four main areas you should invest a lot in learning:

  • The C# language - there are huge and important features introduced after C# 2.0. These are not trivial, and you should really learn them. LINQ and Lambda expressions are the most significant ones. Overview of C# 3.0 The differences from version 3 to 4 aren't that huge.

  • The ASP.Net - if you decide to continue using it, there are lots of new things too. What's New in ASP.NET 4

  • The ASP.Net MVC framework - while it is not replacing Classic ASP.Net, there is a trend of more agile developers moving to it. Learn MVC

  • The Entity Framework - it has matured and there is no doubt Microsoft is investing heavily in it. This is their choice of data access framework, and you should at least be familiar with it.

Note that all these features improve a lot on the previous versions and introduce new concepts to the way you develop applications. These have been quickly and widely adopted by the community.

You should definitely start learning them.

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Thank you Boris for the detailed reply. Out of all these what would you give the top most priority ? I am already familiar with C# 2.0 & ASP.NET 2.0. – Damien Joe Oct 7 '11 at 5:08
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LINQ and lambdas are essential, so start with them. MVC next. – Boris Yankov Oct 7 '11 at 10:53
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There are a lot of diffrences between .Net 2.0 and 4

I would recomend you learn MVC, lambda expessions first. They will make a huge diffrence to your development work. After that just pick up a c# 4 book and have a read. There are too many new nice features to comprehensively list

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Thank you Tom. What do you say about entity framework ? – Damien Joe Oct 6 '11 at 10:05
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I find it very usefull for talking to MySQL. Its worth learning but wont make such a huge diffrence as MVC and lambda expressions. Lamdba expressions I use multiple times in every project – Tom Squires Oct 6 '11 at 10:35
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Considering Web development, the VS2005(.net 2) and VS2010(.net 4) are very much different. The .net 2 web forms was somewhat made for desktop application developers, so that they can easily start with web development fast, with little knowledge. It follows same stateful model as it's desktop counter part- winforms. But web applications are stateless do.

For migration I would suggest, give more focus on core web technologies- HTML, CSS and Javascript. Try have a good command over them. Combining that with object oriented knowledge, MVC will fill just right. And will make you productive.

And don't forget to learn LINQ(as came after version 2) and how it has changed the .net world.

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Thanks Gulshan, what about entity framework ? – Damien Joe Oct 6 '11 at 11:26
@DamienJoe: At the end of the day if you understand the concept behind ORMs, it's not especially useful to learn a specific one unless you plan to use it for a project. If you're not familiar with ORMs, you might want to start with Linq to SQL as it's much simpler and work your way up from there. – R0MANARMY Oct 6 '11 at 13:37
Thanks Roman, I will take your advice on this one =) – Damien Joe Oct 7 '11 at 5:09

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