Visual Basic Concepts

What is an Internet Application?

Simply put, an Internet application is an interactive, compiled application that can be accessed through a corporate or through the . Internet applications can perform complex business processes on either the client or the server. In a server-based Internet application, the application uses the Internet protocol to receive requests from a client, typically a Web browser, process associated code, and return data to the browser.

In Visual Basic Internet programming, you can add active content to Web pages with little effort. Visual Basic Internet applications link Visual Basic code to one or more HTML pages and handle events raised in those pages by interacting with programs on either a client or a server. There are two types of Internet applications in Visual Basic: server-based IIS applications and client-based DHTML applications.

The user interface in a Visual Basic Internet application can be a series of HTML pages, a mix of HTML pages and Visual Basic forms, or a Visual Basic form that makes use of special components such as the WebBrowser control to take advantage of some of the power of the Internet. Regardless of the type of user interface, the application handles events, calls methods, and sets and retrieves properties based on elements in the HTML page.

The Web pages that make up the user interface for Visual Basic Internet applications are generally produced by a Web designer, rather than a developer. If you prefer to create your own HTML pages you can, but you do not have to. Instead, you can focus on your talents as a Visual Basic programmer by writing Visual Basic code that interacts with and uses HTML. Using your skills as a developer, you can easily produce dynamic, powerful applications for the Web.

For example, using Visual Basic Internet technology, you might create an application that can be used entirely on the browser to let salespeople track their status on the road, then link up to the central server when they return to the office. Or, you might create a sophisticated database-driven system that presents a catalog of selections to your end users, through their browser. Users could choose products from the catalog and your application would run associated Visual Basic code to retrieve product detail from a database recordset and send that information to the user.

For More Information   More about Internet protocols is available on the World Wide Web.