I have a contract in the offering from a client to develop an intranet application for capturing/manipulating/displaying a fairly complex set of marketing data. I’ve done this sort of thing before so the analysis, database etc. holds no issues for me, but the client would most likely prefer ASP.NET as they have some (small) amount of experience with this.
My current default language for web apps is PHP, although I have coded some ASP some time ago. I’ve been coding for 20 years and have a stack of languages and technologies under my belt – including Perl, Java, VB, Delphi and C – so learning a new environment doesn’t worry me, but nevertheless I’d like to get up to speed with the least effort and as quickly as possible.
What books, websites or other resources would you recommend to most efficiently achieve this?
Since you’re an experienced coder, I would suggest simply diving in and you’ll pick it up as you go. From your list of skills, it is most like Delphi (Event-Driven programming).
http://www.codeproject.com is very helpful and has many articles on ASP.NET, including ones for beginners and experts.
I would also suggest an alternative: There is another implementation of ASP.NET called ASP.NET MVC (http://www.asp.net/mvc/). With your background, I have a feeling this will make more sense, and I personally believe it is a much better platform that WebForms. I also believe this site (stackoverflow) was built using it.
Hope this helps…