This page shows you how to activate your page with Visual Basic and Active Server Pages Version 3.0 (ASP 3.0). This version of ASP is the one that works with the scripting version of Visual Basic, VBScript. ASP 3.0 can still be an effective technology because it's based on the less complex technology of scripting.
The latest version of ASP is ASP.NET. Check out the About Visual Basic article Visual Web Developer 2005 Express to learn more about this option.
You can develop an ASP application with only a copy of Windows using the free Personal Web Server (PWS) from Microsoft. If you have Windows 2000 or NT, you can also use the IIS web server that comes with those versions. We're going to use VBScript. Check out this About Visual Basic page for more about VBScript.
But first, a definition. What is ASP 3.0?
An Active Server Page is an HTML page that includes script code that is processed on a web server before the page is sent to the user. In most systems, the HTML (which is always stored on the server) is processed by script code that is also stored by the server using information received from the client browser. The server then builds the page 'on the fly' before sending it to the client. Since ASP just builds a regular HTML page, it can be delivered to any browser.
Here's the essentials of that processing.
1 - A browser sends a request for an ASP page rather than a normal HTML web page.
2 - The server finds the ASP page and runs the ASP code in the page.
3 - After the code runs, the server returns standard HTML back to the browser.
ASP works by doing the heavy lifting on the web server. For example, suppose you want to send a customized calendar (maybe with the latest sales events at your business marked in) to visitors at your page. You can pull the latest information out of a database, combine it with a information from the browser, build a calendar "on the fly" in HTML, and send it back to the browser. The magic part is that you can create the HTML returned to the browser from databases, ActiveX components, Visual Basic …. anything your programming skill can invent!
On the next page, we'll look at a complete ASP application!
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