How I happened to learn .NET?

During the beginning of my second semester in college I went out to town to buy some books. It was there in a store in front of the College House Restaurant (near Railway Station) I saw a Computer magazine by the name Developer IQ. During my school days I used to go the library to read Computer magazines like Digit, PCQUEST, Computers@Home ,…. and I even subscribed to their CDs from our school computer lab just for the Demo Games. So I couldn’t resist the lure and guess what? That CD contained the .NET FMK and ASP.NET Webmatrix. I had no clue idea about .NET at that point of time and my brother told that it’s an upcoming technology and said we buy it. I was very much excited about the Games and other Benchmarking tools in it. After installing the games, the CD was put in the closet where it lay to be uncovered at the opportune moment.

As a new entrant to our CSE Department I got an opportunity to showcase my talent at the Cyber Showcase, a software presentation for the I yr students along with my friend Ramji. I was eager to make a mark there and we decided to present two softwares, a Quiz using Jscript and an Analog Clock using C. During the exhibition of our softwares a couple of my seniors asked “why u didn’t use any Database to retrieve the questions and why no dynamic pages?” We lost the competition. I pondered a lot over this question and thought of learning a Server Side programming language. My brother and I tried a lot to configure Apache Tomcat in our system but in vain. So my dream went into shambles.

It was then my brother happened to borrow the ASP.NET Webmatrix Mechanical Toolkit book from his library. I installed the .NET FMK and Webmatrix as told in the Book and was all too excited to develop my very first Dynamic web page.Success! 8-) I started working on the exercises given in the book chapter by chapter and I never knew developing interactive web apps would be that simple. I didn’t have SQL Server at that time, so I had to download the MSDE (63MB) from my system through a Dial-up connection which lasted over 6 hours. It gave me anxious moments until I could install and configure it for my Webmatrix.

In the next semester we had the same Cyber Showcase, this time round I had developed Quiz using ASP.NET and MSDE along with Ramji and we bagged the First Prize. Right from that moment I developed a passion for .NET Technology and believe it or not we bagged the First Place in the South Zone of Microsoft-India Student Project Program 2004-2005(Expo’05,Chennai). A remarkable achievement is it. My ardor for .NET will persist.