As Visual Basic developers, we have seen a distinct move away from single, monolithic executables to distributed, component-based architectures. With this shift has come the need to think differently. We need to think of applications as a set of components working together to provide the needed solution.
As technology changes, we continue to modify our component architectures to support those changes. With the increased need for the development of Web-based applications, the next step is to combine what we know about component-based development with today's Web-based technologies. Tools such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Active Server Pages (ASP), and Internet Information Server (IIS) applications (also known as WebClasses) must be added to our tool kit.
But how do we fit these tools into what we already know as Visual Basic programmers? Do we need to learn HTML? Can we build components that are then called by ASP? Can we build Web applications by using our favorite tool: Visual Basic?
This book answers these questions. The author, A. Russell Jones, provides a brief introduction to HTML to get us started. He then presents examples of ASP and IIS applications and discusses them in detail to help us get up to speed quickly and keep us in step with today's technologies.