(Note - the following is long, but I would greatly appreciate insight, I need some focus and opinions on what to focus on)
Ive reached a point at my job that they are giving me projects to start working on outside of the senior desktop support role I have held.
They know my interests lie in application development, but outside of HTML, my knowledge is limited. I have taken classes in C, I have dabbled in VB.Net, C#, and PHP/MySQL, but its been just that, dabbling to get a feel for things..
The firsts projects I am working on are to revamp our Help Desk Ticket Tracking system.
Right now its an Access 97 database and while I dont really know squat about access, its a good starter project and where I work, Access is good to know..
My dream is eventually to make a web based ticket tracking system, and due to that, I imagine PHP might be best to get into, but that may not be neccesarily true and I also am not sure such a project would be approved.
No matter what I choose to learn, it will be on my own, and I need to focus on one language and master it. I would like to be able to do web projects, I would like to deal with databases, I would like to be able to sorta do a jack of all trades type stuff...
What might be most benefical to learn? Consider me more or less a beginner but also a quick learner.
C#? This was reccomended to my by the Applications Manager, he also mentioned it might not be best to start with.
VB.Net? Also reccomended, but because we will be doing a conversion from Office 97 to Office 2003 soon, and macros will need to be written, little apps, etc.
PHP/MySQL? for the web based side of things... other? We are about to start an intranet project. Using Sharepoint? I beleive. This could be helpful for those types of little applets etc
ASP.Net?
Something Else???????
I am leaning twords PHP, but that might not be be the best to learn in my environment. Any thoughts at all would be appreciated.
*Note - setting up a server with IIS or Apache/PhP/MySql is not a problem at all. If I go php, I might even just make it a linux server so I can hone my skills on that as well.