Professional Visual Basic 6 Web Programming [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Jerry Ablan (Author, Editor), Matt Brown (Author), Dwayne Gifford (Author), Pierre Boutquin (Author), Paul Wilton (Author), Richard Harrison (Author), Jeffrey Hasan (Author), Matthew Reynolds (Author), Dimitriy Sloshberg (Author), Michael Lane Thomas (Author), Thearon Willis (Author), Micheal Lane Thomas (Author), Tim Waters (Author), Tom Barnaby (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
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.

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 1081 pages
• Publisher: Wrox Press; 1st edition (August 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 186100222X
• ISBN-13: 978-1861002228
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,340,058 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Alot covered, none very well, February 3, 2000

By	Patrick G. Hodo "AngryPaw" (Texas) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have to agree with previous reviewers, this book DOES cover quite a bit. From DHTML to IIS Applications, but it has to be considered a beginner to intermediate book on Web programming in VB6. Even though the long-term viability of Web Classes is under question, the utter lack of any quality material on the ONE thing Microsoft touts as "Web" enabled in VB6 is extremely disappointing for a book so expensive. You can debug problems with your objects in VB6 with WebClasses that you can't perform with an ASP page and a compiled dll. Do they even mention this? No.

For the interested, you can find most of the material discussed in this book by simply looking on MSDN or other web sites for articles on the subjects you're interested in. With multiple authors, that's all you will get out of this book, anyway.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not well clearlly writen - too many authors, July 31, 2000

By A Customer

I have 4 years VB programming experience, but after read 7 chapters of this book, I'm still feel confusing. Everything are talked a little bit, but nothing is discussed in detail.
Each chapter is not well connected, this not like a book but like a huge magazine with a bunch of articles -- too many authers can mess up a good name book. They seems never talk to each other before and after writing this book. for examble, in beginning of chapter 9, it says: "By now you have learned how Active Server Page (ASP) use components." -- False! I never learned, at least in this book!
In chapter 6 -- DHTML Application. The example application is only working in VB IDE even after making the package. It's either the author's problem or Microsoft's problem.
As a "Professional VB Web programming book", it neither explains how to deploy a Web application well in general, nor teach you programming in detail.
This book turns me to read other ASP book.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Looking for WebClass Examples, and Disappointed, November 30, 1999

By	David Todd (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

I was looking for solid examples of WebClass programming, and I thought this book had it. Boy was I disappointed! 100+ pages on general background, much of it going in circles the way material like that seems to, then a scant few pages giving one very anemic and sketchy example of a WebClass project. I bought this book on the strength of the other reviews here. Maybe it is strong in other areas and my investment will prove not to be a waste in the long run...I don't know yet. Just don't expect to get WebClass fluent from it!