Chapter 3 -- IIS This A Template I See Before Me?

Chapter 3

Developing Web Applications

ROGER SEWELL

Roger's origins in programming lie in a small room in a Leicestershire school, where he spent many a happy hour punching out tape on a teletype terminal before connecting to a mainframe via an acoustic coupler modem and finding that his program didn't work. Between then and the start of his Visual basic programming career, he spent his time in the murky world of mainframes bashing out Fortran programs for scientists. Roger first saw the VB light in early 1994 and hasn't looked back since. Roger lives in Oxfordshire with his wife Kath and their young family. When not playing or watching sports Roger fights a losing battle against the jungle growing around the house.

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 multitalented 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.