I was wondering if anyone has any tips on transitioning from PHP to asp.net c#? I've been developing in PHP for 7 years and I'm interested in learning asp.net. However, I've been disappointed with the books that I've read so far. Seems like every asp.net book has so many examples of clicking here and dragging here and right click on this, etc... that I seem to get lost. Learning the C# language isn't bad...I think I'm getting lost in either the IDE or the .NET framework. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
I suggest you look at asp.net/mvc, not webforms - it will be a more natural migration.
The good resource is the official site: http://asp.net/mvc - it has tutorials, videos and more.
The .NET base class library (BCL) is very large. It is what you will interact with most of the time (outside of your own code). The only advice I can give - look things up on MSDN. It has very good documentation and it is worth taking your time reading through it.
For Visual Studio - the VS tips and tricks blog is a really good resource to learn about it.
Coming from PHP there's probably less you need to un-learn (I was a classic ASP programmer for a long time and made the jump to .NET about seven years ago).
Microsoft has a bunch of free tutorials, as does the W3Schools site. I found the Macon State tutorials to be extremely helpful when I was starting out:
http://www.maconstateit.net/tutorials/aspnet20/default.htm
The Microsoft exam prep books are pretty straightforward, too, mostly dealing with code instead of drag-and-drop.
I felt the exact same way about the .NET / Visual Studio environment when I first approached it.
If you're not into all the GUI stuff I would recommend George Shepherd's ASP.NET 4 Step by Step from Microsoft Press.
I learned ASP.NET basics on the 3.5 version of this book and I loved it. He really starts with the nuts and bolts stuff (open a telnet window and interact directly with the HTTP server for example) that I think would appeal to most *NIX veterans. His approach gave me a good feel for what all the complicated controls in ASP.NET are really doing under the hood, which was instrumental in growing my understanding of the platform.