Programming Visual Basic 2005

Chapter 8. Web Application, Design, and First Forms

In this chapter, you will begin to create a web application. As in Part I, you will find that we get down to business quickly, but this time a bit of introduction is absolutely necessary before we can start creating applications. The introductory comments are intended to set the stage for everything else we're doing. I'll keep them as short as possible.

There are five essential, overlapping stages in the development of any application: Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing, and Deployment. These are described in Chapter 1, and except for Deployment, are no different for web applications than for Windows applications.

The key difference between a Windows application and a web application is in deployment. Applications deployed to the Web do not need to be distributed to your clients; you simply deploy to the "production server" (the machine your clients connect to) and your application is instantly available.

Tip

Parts I and II are relatively independent. You do not need to have read Part I to understand the material in Part II, but, where they are relevant, I'll refer you to topics already covered in earlier chapters, rather than duplicating the material for web applications.

The requirements for a meaningful web application will be spelled out in this chapter, and the rest of the section will focus on implementation. We will explore design decisions as we go, and our general approach, once again, will be to get it working and keep ...