Visual Basic Concepts

Developing IIS Applications with Webclasses

An IIS application is a Visual Basic application that uses a combination of and compiled Visual Basic code in a dynamic, browser-based application. An IIS application resides on a Web server, where it receives requests from a browser, runs code associated with the requests, and returns responses to the browser.

In its simplest form, you can use an IIS application to intercept a user request and return an HTML page to the browser. These are just a few of the things you can do with more advanced IIS applications:

• Query databases in response to a user's request, writing information to and from records.

• Retrieve HTML pages and replace portions of them with dynamic content before sending them to the browser.

• Dynamically create HTML elements and generate events for them on the fly, at run time.

With these or other advanced uses of IIS applications, you can perform complicated processing based on the actions users perform in the browser. IIS applications can use Visual Basic code to perform much of the same processing you might have previously done with script, CGI processing, and other methods of Internet application development.

IIS applications are named for Microsoft Internet Information Server, the Web server you use to run your IIS applications. IIS applications can run in any browser, on the Internet or an intranet, and therefore make it easy to reach a broad audience.

This discussion assumes that you are familiar with some basic Internet concepts that are covered in "Introduction to Internet Applications." See it for more information on Internet technologies in general, including , the Internet development environment, and models of Web browser and Web server interaction.

For More Information   See "System Requirements for IIS Applications" for more information on the system configuration needed to develop and test IIS applications.

Topics

	What is an IIS Application? Introduces and defines IIS applications, explains their advantages, and presents the structure of a typical IIS application.
	An Introduction to Webclasses Introduces webclasses and their contents.
	Design Considerations for IIS Applications Presents factors to keep in mind when planning your IIS applications.
	IIS Application Development Process Presents detailed instructions on how to create IIS applications.
	Webclass Events Describes the events in an IIS application, how to add them to the application, and how to activate them.
	The Object Model for IIS Applications Explains the Active Server Pages objects you use in your IIS application.
	Responding to Events in IIS Applications Explains how to write code for common tasks in your IIS applications.
	State Management in IIS Applications Explains a variety of methods for storing and retrieving state in an IIS application.
	Handling Sequencing in Webclasses Describes how to set an order of navigation from webitem to webitem in your application.
	Building Your IIS Application Presents information on compiling your IIS applications.
	Debugging Your IIS Application Presents information on how to test and debug your IIS applications.
	Deploying Your IIS Application Describes how to deliver your IIS application to the Web server and to your users.

Sample Application

Wcdemo.vbp Demonstrates several key features of webclass programming in Visual Basic. In this application, you can see examples of how to fire template and custom events, how to dynamically generate pages in response to user requests, how to use custom webitems, and how to use the URLData property to store state information between requests. Wcdemo.vbp is listed in the directory.