Teaching a .NET Language using ASP.NET

For about a year now, I have rewritten all of the introductory courses at Interface Technical Training to use ASP.NET as the front end application.  Other courses (including Microsoft titles) typically start the student in a Console and graduate them to a Windows application.  In my classes, students learn the language in the context of (in my opinion) the most popular technology - ASP.NET.

Instead of Console.WritleLine("Hello World")...
...why not Label1.Text = "Hello World"?

The benefit of this approach is that students are learning a .NET language (C# or Visual Basic) in the context of real-world scenarios.  In the intro classes, this includes how to parse querystrings, how to parse text from textboxes into numeric data for processing, and how to manage and filter lists of data on web page (to name a few).

With Visual Studio 2010 now in Beta 2, I now demonstrate how what they learn also works in the new .NET 4.0 world.