| DCOM Explained by Rosemary Rock-Evans Digital Press ISBN: 1555582168 Pub Date: 09/01/98

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Visual Interdev-Visual Interdev is used to create Web applications. It needs an Internet connection to a server on the network, or the developer can use the Personal Web Server, in which case development can be done on the PC. The developer works with:

  • HTML files/documents
  • ActiveX layouts (forms containing ActiveX controls), together with Visual Basic Script or Java Script to drive the interface. These layouts are themselves ActiveX controls
  • Active Server pages-the special HTML pages that contain scripts that execute on a server
  • Global file-which contains event handlers so you can write code that executes at the beginning or end of user sessions with your Web project
  • Media files-images, sound, video in standard format
  • Active Data Objects

ActiveX controls could be Java applets created using Visual J++ and inserted into the pages using FrontPage (see below). To run your application you navigate to the page on your site using Internet Explorer.

Visual Interdev has a color-coded HTML editor, an enhanced layout designer, and tools to help edit and add files. It does not yet have a debugger. Visual SourceSafe is used for team working, and it includes ActiveX controls that generate data access scripts for Active Data Objects. Where the developer wants to edit HTML pages, he or she can also use Frontpage, which is integrated with Visual Interdev.

Visual Interdev was released with Visual Studio. Microsoft had worked for some time on its own homegrown Internet Authoring tool code-named Blackbird. The initial release of this tool destined for MSN was cancelled. Microsoft then announced it would be converted to work with HTML pages under the name of Internet Studio, and an early version was previewed at the March Internet conference. The final version renamed Visual Interdev was included in the launch of Visual Studio.

FrontPage-FrontPage is a tool acquired from Vermeer Technologies and is an HTML authoring tool which enables a whole Web site to be visualized, navigated, and created. FrontPage also comes with a personal Web Server so that sites can be tested on a local PC. The tool comes with two main components—an Explorer and an Editor.

The Explorer is used to create the Web site. It uses a graphical layout to enable the developer to see the overall structure of the site. The tool can spot broken links and will automatically update links if pages are moved around. The Explorer can also deal with page updates from different people so it can be used by a team of “webmasters.” A Web Import Wizard can be used to import an existing site into Explorer.

The Editor enables the developer to edit Web pages without needing to use HTML, although HTML code can be edited directly if the programmer wants to. The Editor can be used with Explorer to create pages for the site, or on its own to create single pages. Double clicking the Web Page in Explorer opens up the FrontPage editor, which enables the content to be edited without resorting to HTML code. Many different sorts of HTML tag are supported—marquee text, sound, table, cell, background color, and images.

Convertors included in the tool enable documents from Microsoft Office and other file formats to be converted to Web page format. The tool employs a drag and drop approach to page creation and includes a spell checker and thesaurus. Perhaps of greatest importance, in the context we are looking at the tool here, is that FrontPage 97 supports ActiveX components.

Visual FoxPro-ActiveX components cannot be created using Visual Fox-Pro so we have only provided brief information here. Instead, Visual FoxPro applications can be clients for ActiveX controls and OLE Automation. (Although ActiveX support has been improved in version 5, compatibility problems are not unknown.)

### Other Tools

Tools are also available from third parties that could be used to build ActiveX components.

Borland’s Delphi 3 uses a Visual Component Library (VCL), which is a Pascal Class Library that encapsulates the Windows API. A new ActiveX control expert enables the developer to convert a VCL component and turn it into an ActiveX control to use in Visual Basic, etc.

Select Software’s Select Component Manager can be used to store components—both the source code and the binary code, locally, or remotely. This tool comes with its own object cut="06-06">

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