Back in May of 2001, About Visual Basic reviewed the COM version of WebZinc. We loved it! A sample from that review.

WebZinc allows us to grab information from a Web page, retrieve data about a Web page, search any search engine, fill out a Web form, and more.

Today's WebZinc still does all that (and, yes, it still does more) but it's been '.NET-ified' now. We still love it. But there are some interesting things that have happened in the new version. We'll get to those in just a few paragraphs.

WebZinc's idea is both old and new. Since I'm old but I'm also fascinated by all the new stuff in VB.NET, WebZinc is a natural fit for me. You see, back about thirty years ago, I used to be in the Computer Output Microfilm business (that was 'COM' back before Microsoft) and I became an expert at writing programs that would read a datastream which was really designed to be printed and extract specific chunks of information. Later on, I did a lot of work on what used to be called, 'screen scraping'. I wrote programs that would read a datastream which was really designed to be displayed on a remote 'green screen' terminal and extract specific chunks of information.

Wasn't there a song like that? "Everything old is new again!" This is the basic idea behind WebZinc too. WebZinc reads a datastream that is really designed to be interpreted by a web browser and extract specific chunks of information. The main thing this proves is that it's a really good idea. Really good ideas keep coming up again. Technology advances and people discover that an idea they had before is still useful. The big difference is in the implementation.