Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

Today I (yes, proudly) announce my first web application's availability. As a warm-up to the real work for about2findout, Ive been trying out web programming and created a small application to show you a random learning quote and a form to suggest me other quotes. There is also an administration section to insert, update and delete quotes from the database. You can find the free application at http://www.about2findout.com/6Cquotes .

The application is written in ASP.NET 2.0 and retrieves the quotes from an MS Access database. (I cannot afford MS SQL databases for such small applications.) I've learned a lot writing this application, and these are the main points I wanted to share:

• ADO.NET : That's the name of the database access technology in ASP.NET. It's more difficult than I imagined on first sight. Or maybe I just need to get used to it. I've played around with datasets, gridviews, detailsviews and some more. Luckily there are many web sites with explanations and forums full of people that encountered the same problems.
  
• I recommend the learning video's that ship with Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions for free. They are a free sample of what is on learnvisualstudio.net, another site I recommend. It has many training video's that are well explained and a 'lifetime subscription' option. That's for the lifetime of their site, not you life :-) . I like the concept.
• The suggestion form works with a Persist ASPEMail component. Works fine IF the mail server at seekdotnet.com isn't down.
• Sometimes there is a difference between how Internet Explorer and Firefox or other browsers display the pages. The answer to that is browsercap definitions that can be included in the configuration of the machine (machine.config) or the web application (web.config). The problem is that Microsoft doesn't maintain those (why should they?) but outsources that to another company who doesn't do a great job of it either. So you can find back updated browsercap definitions on this site.
  
• Whenever I ran into a problem, I googled a solution rather than using the Visual Studio Help (which I don't like). Very often asp.net or the code project have answers. I recommend those sites.

Please check out the site and send me suggestions for other quotes. Future developments for the application will include:

• transforming it into a web service
• adding rating possibilities
• creating HTML code to insert in other pages to display a random quote

At the moment, there are 106 quotes in the database.