This post started out simple enough and then became very, very, very long, so I decided to divide it up into a little series, sort of like a British television show. Hopefully I can keep it witty – or at least educational – and within the standard six episodes. On to episode one!
A while back I started working through the book “Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# 2010” (MacDonald, Matthew. Beginning ASP.NET in C# 2010. USA: Apress, 2010). It is quite thorough — all 981 pages of it — but there is something exciting about becoming immersed in a massive new world with a confident writer as your guide. ASP.NET is a new world for me. It takes many of the tools I already have — HTML, Javascript, CSS, bits of database programming — and combines them in a structured, object-oriented environment full of web controls and exception handling.
HTML5 is here! A new way to write our HTML pages so that, eventually, they will show up consistently among all the browsers floating around out there. There are so many neat things about HTML5 as well, including new semantic elements to help organize our content better, simplified tags at the top of our pages, and the new tag that everyone wants to play with first – canvas!