I seem to be running into some trouble. Basically, I consider myself a newb at programming. Yes a newb. Not because I don’t know anything, but because I have never actually made anything. I understand a lot of programming concepts of how to do certain things, but I have yet to actually sit down and make an application of my own. Yes, I made that notepad program, but that was mostly goofing around with one feature then it turned into something else.

No no my problem lies in the fact I don’t believe in myself. Have you all ever run into that problem?

I think one thing that holds me up is I understand how to do a, b, and c, but when it comes to putting a and c together. I freak out because it requires that I know how to do d and e too. Well first off I have no frelling idea that I need to know d and e in the first place. Then when I do figure that out I just play with D and E seperately, but am afraid to venture out and put them together with A and C.

I guess the saying “nothing ventured, nothing gained” falls into this. I think my biggest fear is failure not from an aspect of a project, but in life. I feel that if I do fail at programming then nothing will matter after that, and since I have spent my last several years working for this goal I will feel it a waste.

I offered to help do the blockengine because I figured hey something I can work on that will be fun and that I can actually figure out because others will be there to help, but as before I find that I have run into the problem that I need D and E, but I don’t know what they are or where to look.

This is a tormenting problem that has been going through my head for the last couple of weeks. I think it is time for me to stand up to myself. I realize I am a coward, and I need to change.

Has anyone else gone through this at all or am I alone once more out on that dreadful limb?

I have recently talkd to a guy in the DotNetRocks chatroom during the latest DNR live show, and he told me that he learns to do certain tasks by writing an article over it.

So I have decided to do the same thing. I will post little explanations of basic things here on my blog such as how to use query strings, session state variables etc. These are things that took me reading several sites to understand so I will attemt to explain it once so new developers will get it the first time.

Leave your feedback on any ideas.

I was just reading some RSS feeds that I am subscripbed too and this caught my eye.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=86601#86601

This is very true in ASP.NET there are so many options that you can have a hard time decideing what you want to do. In the case of the post do you use several user controls on a single page or several pages?

Another question is do you use a DataGrid, DataList, or a repeater?
While the answer would be easy to see by a developer that is use to ASP.NET it is not to a newb like me.

Take something I want to do for example, which I still can’t seem to figure out how to do. I want to make a category table in a database, and a links table in a database where each link is categorized by the category table. In my code I want it to be completely dynamic. Basically it grabs all the categories out of the categories table, and all the links out of the links table. Once they are retrieved they are displayed under each categories title like:

ASP.NET
http://asp.net
http://beta.asp.net

Search Engines
http://www.msn.com
http://www.google.com
http://www.hotbot.com

That is how I want it displayed, but I don’t want to hard code anything. In a way like a CMS (Content Managment System).

This is definatly a problem that I see with ASP.NET. Once I learn more in ASP.NET I am going to try to write up articles on how to decide between these many features. This is definatly where the power is in ASP.NET. When you can use the all these features in your development process then you can create awesome websites.

Again this is a good reason for a grok site for ASP.NET.

Any Ideas?