Newbie to coding? Want to do some .NET development?

If you are starting out with writing code and want to try your hand at .NET development, the first thing you should do is get yourself a development environment. You can download for free your prefered Visual Studio 2008 Express development environment from here. From the same page you can also download a copy of SQL Server 2005 Express edition. If you download SQL Server to do some database development, you might also want to download its corresponding client tools (aka "Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express") from here.

You should then take a look at this nice web page that provides two well defined learning paths that will guide you to become a web developer or a Windows developer.

This other page has links to full pages of short "how-to" lessons.

Finally, from this page you can download a free ebook covering basic topics of the C# and VB.NET languages.