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** ASP TIP OF THE WEEK **

When installing Active Server Pages, choose all options including the option to install online documentation and samples.  First, having the documentation available to you in the form of a complete set of web pages is extremely convenient and easy to navigate.  To access this documentation, choose the Active Server Pages Roadmap menu option from your Internet Information Server Start menu.   This will produce a web page with an index of topics on the left and topic content on the right.  It may help you as we move through our discussions of ASP and the IIS environment in future articles, plus its about the only accessible documentation that you'll be able to find when you first install the product.

Second, if you choose to install the sample web site, Adventure Works, you'll see the beginnings, source code included, of a production quality web site used for a very practical on-line catalog ordering application.  In this sample application, you will see a complete treatment of all the bells and whistles of the Active Server Page environment along with a reasonably efficient way to produce an on-line product catalog.  An interesting note: if  you've already fully installed Active Server Pages, you'll notice that the previous link takes you to this site, otherwise, my apologies.

Summary

In this week's article, we've begun exploring some of the specifics of Active Server Page functionality.  We began our coverage of one of the most important pairs of objects intrinsic to ASP: Request and Response.  We found that these objects are important because they allow us to interact at a very high level with the HTTP request and response protocol and that they abstract the details of dynamically creating HTML output.

We also learned about objects and why they are important. I felt that a brief discussion might level the playing field with respect to terminology and concepts and provide a starting point for your research into the specifics of future application development in this potentially new environment.

Next time, we'll continue with the Response object.  This object provides more functionality in the form of more properties and methods and also provides the developer with more flexibility to control the flow of an application.  Once we master the art of interaction between the browser and the server, we'll dig deeper into what constitutes a complete ASP application, how you start it and how you keep it maintained.

As always, I appreciate having you along as my guest and would be even more appreciative of any feedback you may have.  See you next time!

Author: Keith Cox
Date: 12/29/97

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