Microsoft Course - Developing Web Applications with Active Server Pages and VBScript — A 4-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Course Synopsis

Today, users expect the web environment to be responsive and interactive. Active Server Pages (ASP) is a Microsoft server-based technology for building dynamic and interactive Web applications. ASP provides a powerful development environment for creating Web applications. Through its object model it exposes core functionality needed by any Web programmer.

Visual Basic Script (VBScript) is an extended subset of the Visual Basic programming language. This course will use VBScript when developing ASP applications.

The course will take ASP novices and introduce them to this powerful framework, before looking into the ASP object models and development techniques. Creating sophisticated web pages and data-driven applications with ASP, as well as performance and security, will be covered.

The course is made up of a mixture of lectures and hands-on exercises. There are separate practical sessions for each technical chapter which reinforce the theory and techniques covered in the course

Course Objectives

On completion of this course, delegates will be able to:

• Write and deploy ASP-based Web applications
• Understand how IIS and ASP fit together
• Use VBScript to write ASP applications
• Interact with Web clients using ASP built-in objects
• Maintain state and pass data between Web pages using various techniques
• Use scripting objects and server components
• Read and write server-side files
• Access databases using ADO
• Send mail from an ASP page
• Implement ASP security, authentication and authorisation
• Address ASP performance issues

Intended Audience

This course is suitable for Web developers and Web support personnel wishing to use Active Server Pages for writing and supporting server-side applications.

Course Prerequisites

Before attending this course, students must have:

• Current experience of a block-structured language such as Basic, C, C++, Java, Perl or REXX
• Working knowledge of the Internet, and building web pages using HTML

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Outline Course Contents

Web Application Development

• Static HTML pages
• Hyper Text Transfer Protocol(HTTP)
• Client-server interaction
• HTTP request and response
• MIME
• Dynamic Web content
• Client side applications and technologies
• Server-side applications and technologies
• Invoking server-side applications
• Maintaining state

ASP Environment

• Internet Information Services(IIS)
• Web applications, Creating a virtual directory
• ISAPI and ASP
• ASP application life cycle
• ASP execution; ASP basic syntax
• VBScript Syntax
• Variables
• Building blocks: operators, expressions, comments
• Control flow: For...Next, Do...Loop, If...Then...Else, Select...Case

VBScript Language

• Defining and using Sub and Function procedures
• Creating and using arrays
• Is-functions String, date and math handling

ASP Object Model

• VBScript object syntax
• Dot notation
• Overview of ASP object model
• ASP Collections

Requests and Responses

• Request object
• Accepting data from the browser
• Request collections
• QueryString collection
• Form collection
• Response object
• Sending data to the browser
• Sending cookies to the browser
• Redirecting the browser
• Response buffering

Applications and Sessions

• Creating objects
• Sessions and Session object
• Applications and Application object
• The Global.asa file
• Scope of variables
• Passing information between pages and users

State Management

• Maintaining state with hidden fields
• Maintaining state with dynamic URLs
• Form PostBack technique
• Using cookies
• Storing state on the server-side
• Pros and Cons of different state management techniques

Error Handling and Debugging

• Types of errors
• Error handling in VBScript
• The 500-100.asp page
• The Error object
• Debugging scripts

ASP and the Server

• The Server object
• Component based development
• n-tier application structure
• COM+ and transacted scripts

Scripting Objects and the FileSystem

• Built-in Scripting objects
• Dictionary object
• FileSystemObject
• Drive, Folder, File and Textstream Objects
• Reading and Writing files

Installable Components and Email

• Installable Components
• Browser capabilities component
• Permission checker component
• Other components
• CDONTS
• Sending mails

Database access with ADO

• Active Data Objects(ADO)
• Connection object
• Command object
• Recordset object
• Retrieving records from databases
• Updating databases

Security

• Web authentication mechanisms
• Impersonation accounts
• ASP permissions
• Basic authentication
• Using SSL
• Digital certificates
• Authenticating against a database

Performance Tuning

• Performance Issues
• Web Application Stress Tool

Conclusion

• Future evolution of ASP
• Sources of information