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Visual Basic 6.0 Enterprise Edition
by By Robert Singer—NOCCC, rsinger1@juno.com - September 26, 1999 at 12:34:50:
Microsoft Visual Basic development system is a productive tool for creating fast business solutions for Windows and the Web. It can be purchased as a stand-alone product or as a part of Visual Studio 6.0 from your favorite software reseller or directly from Microsoft at standard, academic or volume pricing.The Enterprise edition allows professionals to create robust distributed applications in a team setting. It includes all the features of the Professional edition, plus Back Office tools such as SQL Server, Microsoft Transaction Server, Internet Information Server, Visual SourceSafe, SNA Server, and more.
Printed documentation provided with the Enterprise edition includes the Visual Studio Enterprise Features book plus Microsoft Developer Network CDs containing full online documentation.
Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) is a component-based transaction processing system for developing, deploying, and managing high-performance, scalable, and robust enterprise, Internet, and intranet server applications.
Internet Information Server is a platform for a new generation of World Wide Web applications that must interact with other BackOffice components and applications.
Visual Safe Source tracks changes to files and stores the changes so that files such as code modules, can be easily and economically reused.
When you learn Visual Basic you leverage what you’ve learned because it is then possible too develop applications for other Windows based applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and Access with Visual Basic. You can also use Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript), a subset of the Visual Basic language, to develop Web Based Applications thus as a developer there is no need to learn a new scripting language for your web development.
New in Data Access —Better and more efficient ways of accessing rational and non-relational data using ADO. ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) is a replacement for Data Access Objects (DAO). ADO is easy to use, language-independent, and has a flatter object model used in comparison to DAO. This means that it contains fewer objects and more properties, methods, and events. Much of the functionality contained in DAO was consolidated into single objects, making for a much simpler object model. The Data Environment designer provides an interactive, design-time environment for creating ADO objects.
At design time, you set property values for Connection and Command objects, write code to respond to ActiveX® Data Object (ADO) events, execute commands, and create aggre-gates and hierarchies. You can also drag Data Environment objects onto forms or reports to create data-bound controls.
A new OLEDB-aware data source control functions much like the intrinsic Data and Remote Data controls, in that it allows you to create a database application with minimum code. With the new data source controls, you can connect to a local or remote database. You can open a specified database table or define a set of records based on a Structured Query Language (SQL) query or stored procedure or view of the tables in that database; Pass data field values to data-bound controls, where you can display or change the values; Add new records or update a database based on any changes you make to data displayed in the bound controls.
The Enterprise Edition comes with a “The Data View” window that presents a view onto one or more database connections. It provides access to the entire structure of the database on a particular connection. The Data View window provides the means to use the Microsoft Visual Database Tools (Query Designer and Database Designer) to visually manipulate that structure of a database including database diagrams, tables, views, triggers, and stored procedures. By simply double-clicking, dragging and dropping, and using the right-click features, you can open, create, and edit your database objects.
The SQL Editor allows you to create and edit stored procedures and triggers in both SQL Server and Oracle from within the Visual Basic development environment.
New for the Internet—tools that allow Visual Basic to be used with the Internet Information Server for development of server side applications that allow the user to send requests from a browser. This is done using a combination of Visual Basic and the Internet Information Server
Internet Information Server application resides on a Web server, where it receives requests from a browser, runs code associated with the requests, and returns responses to the browser. You can use an Internet Information Server (IIS) application to intercept a user request and return an HTML page to the browser. With IIS you can query databases in response to a user’s request, writing information to and from records; Retrieve HTML pages and replace portions of them with dynamic content before sending them to the browser. IIS applications can run in any browser, on the Internet or an intranet, and therefore make it easy to reach a broad audience.
The Dynamic HTML (DHTML) technology in Microsoft Internet Explorer exposes properties, methods, and events for each element on a Web page. DHTML Applications allow you to write Visual Basic code to respond to actions on an HTML page, without transferring processing to the server. A DHTML application is a Visual Basic application that uses a combination of Dynamic HTML and compiled Visual Basic code in an interactive, browser-based application. A DHTML application resides on the browser machine, where it interprets and responds to actions the end user performs in the browser.
A few of the things you could do with DHTML include: retrieving data from a page and using it to query a database. Also, you could update a page’s appearance and behavior; creating HTML elements and insert them onto a page in response to user requests.
New in controls—A container control that can be used to create user-configurable toolbars similar to those in Microsoft Internet Explorer
An OLEDB-aware version of DBGrid, the control allows you to quickly build an application to view and edit recordsets. It also supports the new ADO Data control
The DataCombo and DataList controls have greater flexibility and usefulness in database applications. Both controls can be automatically filled from a database field from the data control to which they are bound. In addition, they can optionally pass a selected field to a second data control, making them ideal for lookup table applications.
Summary—There is no question that the Enterprise Edition of Visual Basic is feature rich and there has been a major effort to integrate Visual Basic for development of Database and Web Based applications. This article touches on only some of the features that are available to Visual Basic.
Those of you interested in obtaining Visual Basic need to consider whether you plan to build Enterprise level applications. Whether you simply need the Professional Edition for development of professional applications, or whether you need the services of the Learning Edition so that you can learn the basics.
The Enterprise Edition retails for $1,299 with a version upgrade costing $759. The Professional version retails at $549 with a version upgrade costing $279 and the Learning Edition has an estimated retail price of $109.
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