Amazon.co.uk Review
If you'd said a couple of years ago that someone would develop a WYSIWIG-based Web programming environment for the Internet, they might have been forgiven for thinking you were crazy. But lo and behold, Microsoft's Visual Interdev arrives on the scene with its Windows- style interface and advanced scripting features and stuns HTML coders the world over.
Success, of course, comes at a price. This is by no means an easy language to master, and that's where Professional Visual Interdev 6 Programming comes in. It starts with the easy stuff, opening with a comprehensive tour of the interface before exploring areas such as debugging and integrating databases with Web sites. Complex functions for the real power users such as Design Time Controls are well explained with an assortment of nicely chosen and comprehensive examples.
It's particularly worthwhile to look at Chapter 12's case study of how to build and operate a Web search engine using COM components. The guidelines given can be easily scaled up to provide multiple-field searching of thousands of records with very little slow down--perfect for sites with large volumes of data and Web traffic. #
Professional Visual Interdev 6 Programming is a welcome addition to Wrox's "Programmer to Programmer" range and should prove invaluable to wannabe--though not beginner-- developers. --Steve Russell
Synopsis
This text begins by introducing Visual InterDev as a development environment aimed at the professional web developer. It shows how existing knowledge of HTML, ASP and scripting can be combined with Visual InterDev features to enable developers to create complex applications, integrate databases and maintain a consistent structure and appearance for a site. It also describes how Visual InterDev can be used to support teams working on large projects and contains extensive coverage of how to use the script debugging features. The book then moves out to cover important aspects of how to effectively use Visual InterDev in rapid web application development by describing how to create design-time controls (ActiveX controls used at design time to build script that is executed at run time), COM components and Windows Script components. A demonstration of how Visual InterDev can be used within an n-tier development environment is achieved by presenting two case studies based on commercial situations. Finally the book introduces the technology areas of XML and XSL, something that all serious web developers could soon find themselves needing to know.
