I've been developing systems for nearly 25 years now
It must be an old picture of Ivan then...or he started when he was 5 years old
What you are facing now, and that I'm facing too, is quite normal, it just takes time. Don't be so demanding on yourself.
I'm in this boat too, as many of us are I suspect. A good reminder to take it slow...I'm going to remind my boss of this!
I'm kind of a professional lurker... I mean, I read all the posts!
Wow, I've become a luker too!
And for the same reasons, I learn a ton. Sometimes another's post answers my questions, sometimes I file it away for the next thing I'll have to do and sometimes it's completely beyond me, but having been exposed to it, I'm more likely to learn it later if I need it.
For a start, I tend to keep things as simple as I can to accomplish what I need. This will build up some knowledge that will allow me to go deeper and more sophisticated in the near future. One thing I learned with a good friend of mine was to try not fighting the framework, and this is from the FoxPro days. This saves a lot of time in the beginning.
I'm going to get this tattooed on my forehead! I'm always trying to go too deep too fast. Yet every time I simplify it to start, it get there sooner!
So, don't worry, we are all here learning together.
Ahmen Brother!
Chan, one of the reasons I'm totally sold on SF is that the developers (and community, like Ivan) are totally helping me get up to speed with both SF and .NET. Before November of last year, I'd never written a line of .NET code. Yet 2.5 months later, I'm chugging away. I have a pretty cool app mostly built. It includes customization to the security mod (see my numerous posts on how to handle row level security), a fancy custom search form and some pretty complicated forms, like a wizard with around 80 pages, that uses a treeview to allow random access to the pages (my posts on how to use the wizard and panel manager). When I first looked at what I had to learn to get done what I need, it was daunting.
I also remember an early post of mine (while I was evaluating it), where I was feeling frustrated and that the SF people weren't getting my problems. I posted that I felt that they were probably getting frustrated with my bone head questions. Well, they weren't. They were happy to answer my questions. Of course me being frustrated and being impatient wasn't helping, as my questions weren't as clear, or researched or well thought as they could be. I try to do a better job now when posting, just to facilitate my learning, but the problem was never that they didn't try to help (and almost always did help...though sometimes I don't like the answer
). It was tough for about the first month or so for me, then it has gotten easier. This has been my experience.
So, keep the posts coming. You'll get there sooner than you think.