WebClass Applications

To understand where a VB IIS application can fit in to Web development, consider the following basic facts about Internet Web page architecture:

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the standard language recognized by all Internet Web browsers (such as Internet Explorer or Netscape). HTML files reside on a server. A browser requests the HTML file from a server when the user navigates to a particular Web page representing the HTML file. The server sends the file to the browser, and the browser interprets the HTML script inside the file to display the Web page to the user.
ASP (Active Server Pages) is a technology that Microsoft provides as a supplement to its Web server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). ASP provides an enhancement to the HTML language that allows IIS (or any other Web server that can understand ASP) to dynamically change the HTML that it sends to browsers.

The end product of ASP is still standard HTML, recognizable by all browsers. All ASP processing takes place on the server and so is completely transparent to browsers, which only see the standard HTML pages produced by ASP.
VB WebClass applications (also known as IIS applications) are essentially an enhancement to the technology of Active Server Pages (ASP) that enable a VB programmer to use the power and ease of the VB programming environment to create applications that run with ASP.

The following sections first give an overview of ASP alone and then proceed to discuss how you can create VB IIS applications to enhance the ASP environment.