VB6 is DEAD!

[jayinthe813]

We currently use VS2013... but this dates back to VS2008.


Yup... pretty much. It's some pretty cool stuff. Even cooler is that because of our platform, I rarely have to get into the HTML or JS.


Correct, we're just using the web-service part of it... not for the pages. the pages are build dynamically by the services, then a JS controller takes the emitted HTML and stuffs it back into the page.


In our case, we do have different pages, but each one is designed for a specific use, like Dashboards, Navigational Areas, detail pages, list pages, process... etc.


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The platform is the webservice portion of it... for those basic blocks, there are aspx pages... so we are talking about maybe a couple dozen. then with that platform in hand, and the accompanying SDK, we're able to build some pretty complex forms. Best part is we do it all through SQL, XML, and VB (or C# if we're feeling a bit feisty). So what we end up with is a few dozen webservices, and a couple hundred DLLs and a nice collection of HTML and JS files.

We use the XML files to define what should be on the page, what's editable, etc. we can then let the platform render it by default. Or, we can then attach an HTML file to it to fine tune the layout, such as displaying in columns or tabs, or a different order of the fields. If we need even more functionality, depending on what it is, we tinker with the VB code... or we add a js file and tinker with it on the client side. So far I haven't run into much wehre I've needed to do that.

-tg

So when the page is being built by the service is that automatically done for you or do you have to create some sort of template to fill the data? My example (probably terrible, remember I am barely a web-guy, I do a lot of winforms) would be lets say you have to query for data, and you want to return an html table filled with the queried data. You send a command to the web service, which runs a stored procedure and returns back this generated html table filled with the data. Was this html pre-determined by you or is there some existing framework (for example) that would just generate the table based on the parameters given? Also, how do you tie this into VB? How do you render the html? With a web browser control?

Sorry to harp, I have become fascinated. I would love to dive into this, the issue is that my job prefers desktop development instead of using servers because they have limited mainframes that do select jobs already, but to extend those mainframes costs money and in the business of maintaining accounts rather than driving new accounts, no ROI means no funding. This means I don't get to play much (yet) with anything involving servers.