ASP.NET Online Learning

[Raze664]

Been lurking around for a while and finally got a question.

What's the best online resources for learning more advanced side of C# ASP.NET MVC or Web Forms, I'm now a lone developer in the team as four others have left so I'm looking for more ways to improve. Microsoft keep bringing out more and more to learn, I get my head around .NET4.0 and the simple membership and best methods to use it, and they scrap it for the new OWIN method of authentication.

I've got an account with PluralSight which is good for learning, but I'm looking to see if there's anything else around with preferably video tutorials with example projects to download. I don't mind a small fee, can probably get work to put it on expenses if it's good enough.

Main topics I'm looking for currently:

• Unit Testing (Has never been done in work, so I'm attempting to change everything around for the better, but I don't have any experience in it)
• MVC5 / .NET 4.5.1
• Entity Framework 6.0 (I've used 5.0 so I've got a fairly good understanding, but bits have changed)
• Async Programming with the .NET 4.5 stuff.
• AngularJS

Cheers

[finlay666]

Pluralsight is one of the best, especially since they purchased Tekpub (who I think had the best videos)

The other way I find useful to learn are looking at the Channel9 videos showing off the new functionality of languages, there is a huge repo there to look at but not many examples, there aren't many for a lot of videos in general I've found.

For MVC/.Net the Channel9 vids are a great place to start as they show off a lot of the functionality in the newer versions of the language, Jon Skeet videos (or his latest book, which I'd recommend regardless) on Async (Saw a talk he did last year on Async and for me it just clicked straight away it was explained so well). Rob Miles has a new C# ebook out but I've yet to have a read of it yet (has a rubber duck on the front). Nerd dinner is a good starting point for learning more advanced parts of the core framework like donut caching.

Unit testing... that is a tricky one. To me Pluralsight videos aren't the best in this respect as it's a very dry subject, what sort of unit testing are you hoping to achieve? Coded UI unit tests as well as testing actions, db calls etc? I'd take a stab at writing your own framework for it to build on NUnit/XUnit/MSTest (in order of preference). The best way is to get stuck in, it's not that difficult a thing to do (you can put a unit testing step on top of a build script for instance) and if you know your own testing framework built on top of something else you can add some rather nifty bits (I had scripted Selenium tests that would work on top of the base data access so the page could be manipulated at will and would automatically take a screen dump of any YSOD or page error/anomoly

Pass on AngularJS, I'm server side mainly so don't usually look at that sort of thing

[TheAnimus]

Well I mostly agree with Fin on that.

So I'll jump on the AngularJS bit.

What do you want it to do? You making the whole SPA (Single Page Applications, ie websites that let you do lots of stuff without navigating away) thing?

Myself, I'd start with making sure you like TypeScript. JavaScript is fornication-nuts insane, verbose and irksome. I like TypeScript, much more than Dart. Oh TypeScript compiles down to regular JavaScript. They have some good quick tutorials on their website.

Once you've got a bit more comfortable with TypeScript and doing Unit Tests on your JavaScript stuff, I'd look at knockout. It has some more simplicity than AngularJS. Obviously learning both is best, but myself I found KO much quicker to learn. With a good use of TypeScript for all your ViewModels, I don't find myself wanting to reach for AngularJS much.