VBITS—Orlando, Florida—September ’96

Programming the Microsoft Internet Information Server

Microsoft's Internet Information Server is fast and powerful but how do you as a Visual Basic developer integrate yourself into the backend? This session is a crash course in ways to extend the Internet Information Server on the backend. Examples are provided on how to create CGI, WinCGI, and OLEISAPI applications with Visual Basic as well as how to leverage the Internet Database Connector without writing a lot of code.

Setup, Installation and Delivery

At a point in every project there comes a time when a developer has to distribute his work to users. The time and effort on a project is usually put into the development of the application and distribution often comes as an afterthought. Gone are the days of Visual Basic 3.0 where as long as you distributed your .EXE and VBRUN300.DLL your application would work. The minimal Visual Basic 4.0 install requires thirteen files for the 16-bit edition and five files for the 32-bit edition. This is not including any custom controls and their support files. Many of these files not only need to be copied onto the system, they also need to have information added to the system registry. This session will cover many of the issues that accompany distributing a VB 4.0 application. The advantages and disadvantages of several setup tools including the VB 4.0 SetupWizard, InstallShield Lite and WISE 4.0 will be covered

All Day Session! Part I: The Internet Unwrapped

You'll get a comprehensive overview of the full range of tools and technologies available for Web design and implementation, to help you evaluate your Inter/intranet development strategies. Final topics to be covered will be under constant revision up until the session, to keep the materials current. But here's an synopsis of plans as we went to print. The full day tutorial begins with an overview of today's Internet technology. First, you'll:

• Step through Internet architectures and transport protocols.
• Examine both client- and server-side tools, from Netscape to Explorer, from Microsoft's Internet Information Server to competitors such as Purveyor, and utilities from Web crawlers to replicators.
• Review authoring in HTML, including design principles and a review of authoring tools such as HoTMetal, and Microsoft's offerings from Word's Internet Assistant and FrontPage to the more sophisticated Internet Studio.

Then, you'll move to the server to dig into active HTML, from programming for the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and the Binary Gateway Interface, such as Microsoft ISAPI implementation. Next, scripting and development languages will be examined. JavaScript will be compared to VBScript, Active Objects compared to Netscape plug-ins, and Java contrasted with Visual Basic. Finally, Microsoft's toolset and approach will be described including the "Sweeper" interface, communications from WinSock to TAPI, and the various server APIs. We expect to be able to examine Internet Explorer 3.0, Microsoft's latest browser release, in detail, and describe Shell View's approach to integrating file and Net access. There are innumerable tools and technologies to get up to speed on; only a full-day immersion like this can help you span all these subjects this quickly, this efficiently.

Part II: Build a Web Site from Scratch

• Installing and configuring IIS
• Installing and configuring FrontPage
• Connecting IIS to SQL Server; Logging
• FrontPage Extensions for IIS
• FrontPage Wizards
• FrontPage 'Bots
• Publishing data: SQL Web Assistant, IDC, OLEISAPI
• Users, Security, DCOM

Download ZIP file of Orlando VBITS Session Notes (848K)

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