Creating Internet Components

The preceding chapter discussed how to use the Internet components that ship with Visual Basic. Those components provide the client and peer services necessary to write chat, file server, and browser applications that use the Internet. This chapter covers how to create your own components for use over the Internet. These components can take several forms:

• ActiveX controls extend the capabilities of any Internet application, whether it uses Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Dynamic HTML (DHTML), or ActiveX documents. Chapter 6, "ActiveX Controls," covers the fundamentals of creating these components, but this chapter discusses the special considerations for using them over the Internet.

• HTML pages make up most of the material on the Internet. Visual Basic doesn't include tools for authoring HTML directly, but it does provide components that can be used in HTML such as ActiveX components and Visual Basic, Scripting Edition (VBScript). This chapter shows you how to use these tools in HTML.

• DHTML pages are a new type of component that Visual Basic can create. This chapter shows how to use the DHTML Page Designer and discusses things you need to consider to use these pages within an application.

• ActiveX documents are Visual Basic's earlier attempt at dynamic Web pages before the DHTML standard was proposed. These components are different from both Visual Basic forms and DHTML, so again there are special considerations.

• Web classes manage server-side objects in Internet Information Server (IIS) applications. These classes run under IIS and make use of the IIS object model.

This chapter shows how to use Visual Basic to create or enhance these components. The topics in this chapter are closely related to the topics in Chapter 9, "Creating Internet Applications," so you may want to read these chapters together to understand the breadth of Internet programming with Visual Basic.