MCDBA - Module Choice

[Rainbowhawk]

Morning All,

The company I work for has decided to send me on a MCDBA course and has asked me to choice which one of the elective modules I wish to do.

My choices are

Visual Basic .NET for Web 70-305 Series
Visual C# Web Applications 70-315 Series
Microsoft .NET Applications 70-316
Visual C# XML MCAD 70-320 Series

All which sound good but I am not sure which would be best.

Would appreciate your thoughts.

Hawk

 

[boblarson]

My suggestion, since a lot of companies use it is Visual C# for Web Applications. I would prefer myself to work with VB.NET but the trend I've noticed is that C# is the preferred .NET development language for web apps, and even a lot of desktop apps.

 

[Pat Hartman]

If you are working with Access, none of these courses would be particularly helpful. You would find an SQL Server course useful though since the concepts of relational database design apply to all relational databases.

Of those choices, my personal pick would be vb.net. Trying to read C gives me a headache. But the real choice depends on where you want to go and which course will best help get you on the path.

 

[Rainbowhawk]

Thanks for that guys, certainly going to require a lot of thought.

As I understand it the company I work for is wants to move away from access databases and move over to a server based system.

My gut is telling me that C is more practical but that VB is easier to learn.


Will ponder it as I have a few weeks to decide

 

[Pat Hartman]

Make sure that they are moving away from access for the right reason. If they are happy with their present applications and would like to use SQL server for their database, that is a minor change to an Access application if it was properly developed. If they don't like their Access front ends I'd be interested in hearing why.

 

[Rainbowhawk]

The reason they don't like access is that it is

1) not the most secure application

We have a lot of people who like to meddle with the databases

​

2) we are using access 97

 

[Pat Hartman]

You get excellend data security with a SQL Server back end and if you move into the 21st century with your Access version, you'll find a whole new world of functionality. This is infact a great opportunity to move to A2007. As long as the other people don't need to develop applications themselves, you can distribute the FREE A2007 runtime to the users and let the developers have the full retail version. That plus adequate network security should keep your people out of trouble.

 

[georgedwilkinson]

And you can write massively unsecure programs in Java, C++, C# .Net, ASP .Net, and VB .Net, usually through bad programmer habits. Security is not normally a good reason to avoid or select any of them because you can screw just about any environment up pretty bad.

 

[whitespace]

These days I reckon it's more about learning the framework (ie .net) than the language. If you learn C# then you'd find it pretty easy to pick up VB.net and vice versa.

However, personally I'd go for C# as it seems to be the one Microsoft are concentrating on - for example they have launched an API for developing games on xbox 360 called XNA - all support and guidance on this is in C# only.

As an added bonus C# is almost identical to java so you'd be learning that as well.

Finally it would be slightly easier to learn VB.net from C# as you'd be used to using case sensitive variables/objects whereas as going to C# from VB.net you might struggle to get used to this. The key though is learning object oriented programming principles - from there learning C#/VB.NET is just learning different syntax really.