Summary

We've seen a lot of new concepts in this chapter, and there's been a lot to take in. I've deliberately moved through things very quickly to get you familiar with the most important issues of declaring and using variables. We've seen how to declare variables using the Dim keyword, use them to store information, and then make powerful changes to that information.

Specifically we've seen:

• How to declare a variable using Dim

• What parts of a page can see a variable, why some can't, and how to control it

• Ways of manipulating strings of text in our code

• Different ways of storing numbers

• Why it's useful to have your program remember true/false values, and how to do it using Booleans

• Date variables, how to obtain correct dates, and how to use them in your pages

• How to obtain dates reliably using the Calendar control.

We also touched on arrays, which are special variables that can hold lots of other variables of the same type, but we'll be learning much more about this in the next chapter. We'll also learn more about converting objects from one type to another, something we briefly discussed in this chapter when we used CInt and CDate.

Perhaps even more importantly, we've see how to store data for longer than the split second between a page being requested and the request being completed.

The things you've seen in this chapter will be useful every day of your programming life. As you program more and more, you'll realize just how powerful these simple data types are.