Web classes??????

What are web classes? What can you do with them?

WebClasses are special class modules used in VB IIS projects. They ultimately end up as a DLL that's called by an ASP page (that's created for you at compile). They provide similar functionality to ASPs in that you work with the response and request objects. You can also involve HTML templates and do some tag substitutions on-the-fly with these templates. WebClasses use a few extras that you don't find in ASP that are supposed to be handy but end up being kind of clunky. For example, you have a URLFor function that gives provides the URL to a component of a WebClass project (custom item or template item) - which you kinda need since the URLs involved with the DLL end up being kinda screwy.

I would recommend using ASP over WebClasses as WC management can be a real pain - updating them is a hassle because you have to recompile a DLL and there are often issues with IIS when you're replacing the DLL. It sucks to have to shut down and restart your web services just to update a single web project. ASPs are so much easier to deal with.

Another bad thing about WebClasses is that they're being removed in VB.Net. ASP will still be around as ASP.Net. I have to say that I really despise these '.Net' names.

You can do just anything with WebClasses that you can do with ASP but in my opinion it's not worth the hassle to work with them if you can do ASP. You have to know VB to do WebClasses. If you know VB then VBScript for ASP shouldn't be a problem. In either case you'll need to know some HTML to do decent web production.

Paul

Thanks Paul.