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Microsoft's Visual Basic is the dominant PC development language for
PC desktop applications. The current version is VB6 and is also available
as part of the Visual Studio package (together with several other Microsoft
development tools). As such a popular development tool it is not difficult
to find resource for it on the Internet. A good place to start is Carl
& Gary's Visual Basic Home Page.
Fawcette Technical Publications, publishers of the Visual Basic Programmer's
Journal (VBPJ), have developed an excellent
site at Development Exchange
full of articles and up to date news.
While it's still too early for prime-time developers with an interest
in intranets/internet should keep an eye on developments in new web technologies
such as XLM, DOM as well as Java/CORBA.
XML stands for `Extensible Markup Language', XML
is a public format (i.e. non-proprietary) being developed by the Internet
standard's authority W3C. This web page
uses a markup language most people have heard of - HTML; XML will enable
developers to create their own markup languages. Read the XLM FAQ here.
DOM is now officially a recommendation of the W3C.
DOM (Document Object Model) describes a programmatic interface for HTML
and XML. Authors will be able to write content for a single standard DOM
interface rather than a variety of proprietary data structures and API's.
W3C describe the Document Object Model is "a platform- and language-neutral
interface that allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update
the content, structure and style of documents". You can read about the
level 1 recommendation here.
ASP (Active Server Pages) is a Microsoft developed Server-side scripting
technology. ASP is supported by Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Server)
and PWS (Personal Web Server); note that the FrontPage version of PWS does
not support ASP at this time.
MS Access is the most popular desktop database. Fortunately there
are many good online resources for Access.
Visual Basic, in various guises, is Microsoft's language of choice
in Visual Basic (naturally), Access 97, other Office applications and ASP.
ASP (Active Server Pages) is Microsoft's web technology for delivering
dynamic web pages on the Internet or on an Intranet.
For anything except the smallest of programming tasks some form of
organised development is a good idea.
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