Product Description

This book looks at the special demands of web programming, as well as its flexibility, and will introduce you to DNA - Microsoft's web development structure. Programming the browser through a variety of techniques - DHTML, scripting and VB components is discussed. Then how you can use VB to incorporate and customize browsers in your traditional VB applications is covered using MTS and MSMQ. From here, combining ASP and VB to produce dynamic web pages and sophisticated business logic processing for your website is discussed . Once the data has been collected, retrieving data through SQL Server and ADO is covered. Finally data transfer across the web with XML and the new web programming mechanism, Web Classes are introduced.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #743946 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1081 pages

From Amazon.com
Visual Basic 6 is ready to take on the Internet with a variety of options for Web development, both on the server and client side. That's the argument of Professional VB6 Web Programming, a wide-ranging tour of the strengths of VB for Internet development on the Microsoft DNA platform. This book provides essential information for intermediate to advanced VB developers who want to make the shift to the Internet/intranet development using their favorite tool.

Professional VB6 Web Programming provides in-depth coverage of an entire spectrum of options for VB development on the Web. For instance, it contains a guide to using Visual Basic to create business objects used with Visual InterDev and the ASP for delivering Web pages on the fly. (When used with MTS, this approach greatly improves scalability within the ASP model.)

While there are a number of books on VB business objects, this one is unique when it turns to using WebClasses for creating ASP-based applications from within VB. (The author's example here--a soup-to-nuts tour of a message board application created with Web classes--is itself probably worth the price of the book.)

Another potential standout, which most developers probably don't think about, is using VB to process CGI scripts. (The authors write a custom class to manage stream I/O, usually missing from VB, to pull this off. They also show how to use regular expressions from within VB.)

Throughout Professional VB6 Web Programming, the team of authors cover virtually every new and emerging technology, such as XML, RDS, and CDONTS (for messaging), but they also manage to cover essential VB Web development techniques in depth. In all, this book shows that VB is ready to take on Web development, including cross-browser solutions. It's all you need to take your existing VB skills to the next level for today's Web. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Internet and Microsoft DNA overview, HTTP and HTML, Visual Basic Web support, WebClasses: intro and advanced features, DHMTL, ActiveX Documents, ASP applications, VBScript, JavaScript, XML, ActiveX Control Pad, custom ActiveX controls, WebBrowser clients, ExecWB commands, VB server-side components, ADO, RDS, MTS, MSMQ, CDONTS and mail messages, CGI and VB.

Book Info
Covers how the Web works, using your VB skills to bring the internet to your applications, programming the client with DHTML and VB, and customizing and incorporating web browsers in your own applications. Softcover.

From the Publisher
Online discussion of the topics in this book available at Wrox's P2P site

With Version 6, VB has added the ability to develop internet applications on Internet Information Server (IIS), the free web server that comes with NT Server.

Previously web functionality was static and limited but using IIS, ASP and ADO sophisticated, dynamic, data-driven web applications can be created. The web is the fastest growing programming area, now a powerful new platform for VB6 programmers to program web-based applications exists.

Customer Reviews

Book was very useful to me professionally. But not perfect.
I rated this 5 stars because it has the most useful writeup on writing Server Components in VB for use with ASP - chapters 9-11. I wanted to do this and had trouble getting working samples and explanations. I feel that industrial strength ASP is very ugly and unweildy if you don't encapsulate the code into components. MSDN has lots of reference material about this but little, if any, useful "how to" stuff that i could find.

This book showed me how to do exactly what i wanted to do.

Other than that, it is a good introduction into a good number of web concepts, old and new. The first 3 chapters were a good overview of Microsoft web concepts and techniques. The writeup on web classes, if you like them, is good. I really liked the CGI case study including how to implement standard input/output via the win32 API.

The relatively free use of various win32 API functions in VB help overcome a general fear of mixing VB and CC++ functionality.

The book was a bit large but was well organized. In general it gave me a much higher opinion of Wrox books.

Very SQL serve-centric
If you are just starting to use ASP and have access to a MS SQL server, then this is a good read. However, don't even consider it if you have any previous APS experience or don't have access to a SQL server. In fact, there is no mention of MS Access in the entire book! It is pratically usesless as a reference for ASP and just sits and gathers dust.

Total junk
There seems to be a pattern with the books from Wrox. If there is more than one author on the cover, it usually stinks. This book is no exception. They try to cover too much, and end up leaving you mad because you actually spent money on something this bad. This book is nothing more than a door stop!