Category Archives: School

Fall 2020 School Update

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So, finally wrapped up my final course for the year. Only one more year to go and I’ll finally have my bachelor’s degree. I have to say, my original focus heading into my bachelor’s program at DeVry wasn’t Web Development and Administration, but I’m happy that it is now. The primary reason I switched was because my original degree program went away while working on it. It was a degree program more focused on business application programming and was the closest to a pure programming course DeVry offered. When they updated all their IT degrees, they dropped that one and replaced it with something that would have resulted in pushing my progress back. The only course program at that time that wouldn’t result in delaying my progress was Web Development and Administration. A blessing in disguise to be honest.

With only four classes remaining, I have to say that I’m extremely comfortable with ASP.NET/C# website design. Chances are, there are still elements of ASP.NET that I haven’t been exposed to, but I can guarantee it won’t take me long to figure them out at this point. Just need an appropriate use case for me to play around with them. I learn so much better writing out code then just reading about it.

Next up, .NET Core MVC website design. A change from using Forms but looks interesting. That, and I’d rather get more familiar with architecture less platform dependent. The fact that .NET Core works across Windows, OSX, and Linux is far more appealing to me then limiting myself to just the .NET Framework and Windows. Not to say that knowledge is wasted; but I prefer the flexibility.

ASP.NET Class Update

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Really happy I had this class to be honest. Learned a lot about ASP.NET (granted, that should be the case considering this is a class towards my degree) and how it to use C# to code the page functionality. The format of the class was nice. Each week had a lab that culminated in the final course project due in the final week. Have to admit, it was fairly easy and I can see setting up my own multi-page site fairly quickly. Granted, I’m restricted to Windows based on what I learned if I were to build a site. Haven’t dug into how .NET Core works with ASP.NET and if/how it would be possible to deploy an ASP.NET site on a Linux system. At least I understand how ASP.NET works now.

Now I just need to review the website I administer at work built using ASP.NET. Biggest hurdle with that though is the fact it was built using Visual Basic about 10 years ago. Not a fan of Visual Basic and haven’t played with it in over 10 years.

Side note, while I was taking the class, I came to find out Microsoft also released Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0. While I’m thinking of a side project to setup an ASP.NET site, I’m now thinking about digging into Blazor first. Not sure if I’ll completely deploy it though based on how easily I can deploy it for a minimal cost. Thinking my first site will be a static site written in HTML/CSS hosted on S3. No cost unless I go over 5GB, or traffic spikes enough. So many options.

New Class, Here I Come ASP.Net

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Back to expanding my knowledge with a new class at DeVry. This time, developing an ASP.Net website with C#. Looking forward to this as this will directly help me with an ASP.Net site that I took over as admin last year. Fortunately, I still have a few developers who are familiar with the code; but I can’t say it has been easy trying to figure it out only having experience setting up basic websites just with HTML. Granted, the site at work uses Visual Basic; but the the underlying idea is the same. Main page file that defines the page, and and an underlying file that controls the more advanced programming logic.

The first few chapters I had to read helped out immensely as now I understand how ASPX files actually work with the two files. That is what has honestly been throwing me off this whole time with the website at work. I would see the top ASPX file and kept wondering how the hell it actually worked. Now I know. Granted, I should have been able to figure this out as it isn’t that difficult, I just never had time at work since I still had two developers and had other tasks needing to be completed. Now I can better understand how the hell it works.

Back to my class though. Got through the first week without any issue. The class is setup to have a final project that we progressively build throughout the course each weak via the lab assignments. First lab was basically to get familiar with Web Forms by creating two. One that just displayed simple text and the other to have a very basic salary calculator. Since that wasn’t to bad, I spent the rest of the time setting up an Azure DevOps project to track this course project. I’ve got each week setup as an Sprint on my Scrum board and I have a the code setup in the project repository so I can control project versioning. Struggled a bit trying to setup a lab branch tied to my Task, so I held off on branching for now. Going to give another go at setting up a dev/LabWork branch this next week so I can better familiarize myself with GIT branching.

This should be fun and I am legitimately looking forward to this.

School Work Round 7

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In the home stretch. No lab this week, just need to work on finalizing my course project. Final week to add an adjustments, content, and enhancements. Once I’m done I’ll need to validate the sites accessibility and then share it with two people to provide feedback on what they think about the site. Once done collect everything together, write my final report and submit. All that is remaining is the final next week and I’m done.

Definitely learned a fair amount about HTML and CSS. As a matter of fact what I learned about CSS helped me a lot with my blog. Over the weekend, I migrated my entire blog onto my own server in AWS with WordPress installed. While I was able to find the same base template, it didn’t have as much customization as it had on WordPress.com. Had to use Developer’s Tools in Chrome to find the classes and ID’s that defined each element and tweak them to get the site to look like it does now. While I’m certain the site will continue to evolve, I’m happy enough with the site, I’ve made it live. Even figured out how to force the site to use HTTPS and setup my own SSL certificate for the site.