The first page of Chapter 21 in our text book, Microsoft Visual Basic Step-by-Step reads, "In Part 6, you'll focus again on connecting your Microsoft Visual Basic .NET programs to the Internet."

Good idea -
but w-a-a-y too limiting.

This technology can be used for all kinds of applications, not just those on "The Internet". IE has been used as an object library in Visual Basic programs for years and you could use the IE COM object - the same one discussed in Chapter 21 - in VB 6 in just about the same way that it's used in VB.NET. (About Visual Basic has offered this article describing the basics of displaying HTML in VB 6 and this article showing how to solve a problem using IE in VB 6.)

The book also says, "The advantage of using Internet Explorer directly is that you can display complex HTML documents and Web pages without writing the browser software yourself." Again, this doesn't tell the whole story. The real advantage is that this is an alternative model to traditional Windows forms for a user interface.

We'll learn more about this in the next chapter about web forms, but this model has it's own unique components and conventions that people already know how to use and like a lot. Interfacing systems, even between vendors, is already standardized with HTML and can be a lot easier to program because you don't have to worry as much about the different vendor technologies.