Page #10 (Introduction -)

	Introduction -
	Visual Basic Developers Guide to ASP and IIS
	A. Russell Jones

Copyright 1999 SYBEX Inc.

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	What Hardware/Software Is Required?

	You will need the following to complete the projects in this book:

	•		Visual Basic 6, Professional or Enterprise Edition

	•		Microsoft Access or SQL Server version 6.x or higher

	•		Visual InterDev or another good HTML editor

	You'll need Visual Basic 6, Professional or Enterprise Edition, to build these projects. You'll also need either Microsoft Access or (preferably) SQL Server version 6.x or higher. In fact, let's get this out of the way right now: If you try to build Web sites with Microsoft Access, you're asking for trouble. I know this will get me into hot water with all the Access fans out there, but there's a simple reason why I make this judgement (well actually, two reasons). First, the Microsoft Access engine is not thread safe; therefore, when you use Microsoft Access as your database with a Web application, you have the potential for trouble. Although you may not have this problem immediately, it will occur if you use Access long enough. Second, I've tried it, several times, and it doesn't work very well. I'll back off on this enough to say that if you want to use Microsoft Access to initially develop your applications, OK. Just don't use it to deliver applications. By the time you are ready to move your program into beta testing, get it onto Sybase, SQL Server, Oracle—I don't care, just get it out of Access.

	Some (only some) of the projects in this book use the Microsoft pubs database that comes with SQL Server. If you don't have SQL Server, you can download a Microsoft Access database containing the tables of the pubs database from the Sybex Web site.

	Note		To download code, navigate to http://www.sybex.com. Click the Catalog button and search for this book's title. Click the Downloads button and accept the licensing agreement. Accepting the agreement grants you access to the downloads page for the book.

	You'll also need either Visual InterDev (highly recommended) or an HTML or text editor—I use both the Visual InterDev text editor and Notepad. I've also used and liked Homesite, Hotdog, HotMetal Pro, and several other editors. It doesn't really matter which editor you use as long as you can read and edit HTML with it. You won't need a high-powered visual HTML editor to build the projects in this book. You will need to delve into HTML code a little, but this book will help you do that.

	The Web has been primarily a world of text files: text files with markup, text files with code, text files containing XML, etc. The idea is that in a world of standards, everybody can read everybody else's file format. The lowest common denominator has always been the lowly text file, and guess what? It still is, only now the number of text-file-based formats is rising, and they're called "standard," although they're anything but at the moment. Fortunately, you don't have to worry about that too much. As long as you stick to "standard" HTML, and you don't use DHTML, and you don't use ActiveX controls, almost anything you write will work fine in almost any browser as long as you get the syntax right for that specific browser. Welcome to the cross-platform world. Is that generic enough for you? Don't worry, things are not (quite) as bad as I'm painting them here. In any case, you can now use almost any text editor to edit almost any kind of content: text, formatting, database content, code. The Web has been kind to the makers of text file editors.