The crux of working inside the .NET ecosystem is that you need to ignore roughly 90% of it if you want to build anything complicated. Specifically, you have to ignore the 90% of .NET that you'll learn in "Teach Yourself To Build Terrible Intranet Websites with ASP.NET in 21 days".
Those books will tell you about how to drag and drop controls onto a page. Don't do that. They'll tell you about all these cool <ASP:whetever> rich usercontrols. Don't use those (except Repeater and Literal). They'll tell you about Ajax.NET. Definitely don't use that. They'll tell you about the terrible built in ORM garbage that's lurking in VS.NET that you absolutely need to stay away from if you want your thing to stand up in the face of traffic.
Nobody has yet written the book that teaches you the parts of ASP.NET to use. It's a shame, since most of us have stumbled across the same set of amazingly powerful libraries on our own, and are building really cool stuff with them. But nobody has published that list.
Maybe when I get some time I'll do so. Until then, you're going to need to learn .NET by using it. Stay away from anything you can accomplish with wizards or by drag/drop, and you'll do OK.
I'm constantly trying to determine what it is that's wrong with .Net (aside from the politics) -- and I think you might have nailed it -- it might be as simple as 'design view' and all the 'built-in stuff you should never use that looks really tempting/easy'.
That's today's guess anyway.
Such a great language (C#) and platform... while there are certainly healthy parts of the ecosystem/community, a huge chunk of it (majority even?) is crap, which is a shame.
Thanks for the link, that field is really something I've avoided as a learning developer and while it's probably kept me sane in a lot of instances, it's probably hurt my "money makin'" chances more.
