Visual Basic

Developing Web Applications

When I first fired up Microsoft Visual Basic 5 (yes, I did say Visual Basic 5), I was surprised to be presented with a box asking me what type of project I wanted to develop. I was even more surprised to find that there were nine project templates to choose from-who would have thought that little old Visual Basic would grow into such a multi talented individual?

Since that day I have become accustomed to the variety of development options given to us by Visual Basic, and now Visual Basic 6 offers us three new templates: Data Project, IIS Application, and DHTML Application.

I'll examine the IIS Application in this chapter, going through the process of developing a simple application for Internet Information Server (just in case you hadn't worked out the acronym).

This template and the new features embodied in it are intended to give Visual Basic developers the opportunity to develop Web applications without leaving (too often) the environment they know so well. I hope I'll be able to give you a feel for the development process, because it is different from the process of a normal Visual Basic project. I also want to get you thinking differently about how your application should be structured and how your users will interact with your application, because these design issues are probably the biggest change that you as a developer of a Web application (many such applications, I hope) are going to face.