Programming Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0

Visual InterDev 6 adds to the strengths of Visual InterDev 1 by providing a graphical editor, powerful new development tools, new object-based language extensions complete with events, and much more. Visual InterDev 6 brings the development methodology available with Microsoft Visual Basic to the Web development process. You can glimpse the power of the Visual InterDev 6 integrated development environment (IDE) in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. The Visual InterDev 6 IDE provides many new features that let you be more productive when developing applications.

As a member of the Microsoft visual tools family, Visual InterDev 6 was designed from the ground up for developing, deploying, and managing Web applications; for authoring and debugging ASP Web pages and HTML pages; for building VBScript and JScript applications; for achieving and maintaining database integration with Web applications; and as a connection point for Web authors to Microsoft Visual Studio.

Visual InterDev now includes the following core features:

• Site Designer To quickly prototype Web sites, use the graphical Site Designer. In the Site Designer, you can create pages, links, navigation features, hierarchichal structures, and more—all with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface.
• Cascading style sheets (CSS) You can edit style sheets easily in the CSS editor. You can create or modify style sheets for a set of Web pages. You can even preview any page to see how it would look if a style sheet were applied.
• WYSIWYG page editor This new editor includes Design view, which lets you edit and create content in a WYSIWYG workspace. In addition to Design view, other views such as Script and Preview make writing, viewing, and debugging easier.
• Statement completion Statement completion helps you create error-free script statements by presenting you with the names of all available methods and properties when you type in an object name.
• Data environment You can now create and modify data-related objects in a single location—the graphical data environment. In the data environment, you can also drag and drop objects onto ASP Web pages to automatically create data-bound controls at design time. Oracle users will be pleased to hear that the data environment provides the same advanced support for Oracle as it does for Microsoft SQL Server.
• Data-bound design-time controls Design-time controls offer you a richer, more functional, and aesthetically pleasing interface for creating data-enriched pages. Data-bound controls make it simple to incorporate data into your ASP or HTML pages that can "talk" to a database. The controls included with this version of Visual InterDev allow you to target a wide range of browsers or to narrow your focus to take advantage of the unique features of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.
• Dynamic HTML Visual InterDev 6 supports Dynamic HTML (DHTML) in Internet Explorer 4 and other DHTML-capable browsers. The Visual InterDev 6 editor helps you create script for DHTML objects and events by presenting statement completion options for the object model and by displaying the object model hierarchy in the Navigation pane in Script view. As well as scripting directly to the Internet Explorer 4 object model, you can choose to have your design-time controls create client-side data-binding script.
• Developer isolation You can work on local versions of project files, which gives you the ability to test and debug your files before updating the master server. You can also work in master mode, in which files are saved both locally and to the master server.
• Debugging tools Visual InterDev 6 comes with a debugger that helps you test and debug script and Java components. You can use the debugger with VBScript and JScript, as well as with applications written in Sun Microsystems' Java and run using the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine.
• Deployment The ability to build and distribute components and packages from your production server is another important feature of Visual InterDev 6.