Choosing a programming language

I started to look into asp.net and how similar dynamic websites are created. There was no reason why I decided to follow the asp.net route rather than PHP as I’m totally new to both and have no background knowledge in programming. Asp.net is by Microsoft for window’s user however there is a Mac version of it called Mono Develop.

I started by following the forums on asp.net main website and video tutorials available on YouTube. In order to make visual studio work (program that runs asp.net) I installed IIS7 and Xampp. Xampp is a package that installs Apache, PHP and MySQL together rather than individual packages. I do feel that my settings for IIS7 weren’t quite right as every time I entered localhost under web address bar IIS7 default webpage would turn up and once Xampp was installed the homepage of Xampp appeared. Though it seemed like it was detecting where the localhost was it still felt as if something was wrong or missing.

When I changed the setting of IIS7 it created a folder on my C drive called inetpub, which contained subfolders and one of them was called wwwroot. According to some articles if my asp.net files were inside the wwwroot folder it would run but in my case it wasn’t true. The only asp.net that actually worked were the once I created in Visual Studio through video tutorials, apart from that nothing worked. I managed to get hold of some asp.net projects from web, simply to see how other people have worked and find a way out for myself. Allow browsing other projects I couldn’t even open them. I don’t think I know how to import a project in Visual Studio because every time I did, it gave me errors. I tried number of time and with different file extensions such as asp/ asp.net/ asp.net and Ajax.