Editor’s Comments By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group lamartin@tampabay.rr.com Lightening Wade Herman was to write a last minute article to fill this page of the newsletter. He said that he could relate the rebuilding of his daughter’s computer after a lightening strike at her house. He had to replace everything: power supply, hard drive, motherboard, CD drive and modem, all of which he purchased from our friend in the parts business-Steve Singer. Well, he is going to have to visit Steve Singer again. I know that you will find this almost impossible to believe, but Wade's computer was struck by lightening this afternoon while he was half through the article. Sounds like “the dog ate my homework” story, doesn’t it? But I believe him since he lives only a block from me, and shortly before he called me with his tale of woe, I had hurried to shut down my computers and unplug them because of a loud thunder clap that hit with no low rumbles as a prelude. Wade said that his lights flickered when the thunder rolled. A block away mine didn’t. I was lucky. By the way, he had a UPS and a surge suppresser between the power and his computer. Of course, there are the phone line and the cable modem, which I am not sure were protected.

Visual Studio .Net As I mentioned in the last newsletter, I have purchased Visual Studio .Net and am attempting to learn it. By the way, Microsoft came through with the $300 rebate in only a couple of weeks. After a month, I can say that I have made better progress than I expected. Recall VS .Net is a programming environment where you can use either C++ .Net, C# .Net, or Visual Basic .Net to write your code. Furthermore, you can create applications either for the desktop or the web. I have been focusing on learning how to use Visual Basic .Net for web applications, since I know Visual Basic and I would like to be able in the future to replace my use of Active Server Page code for web work with VS .Net.

The image at the bottom of this column is a screen capture of the main page of the web application I created. It is actually about 10 applications that can be accessed from this main page.

The data grid example displays a membership database, where you can click on any column to order by that column and where you can add, edit or delete memberships. The interactive calendar allows you to move through the months to see what meetings are scheduled and to also see what memberships are due or coming due.

The next example allows you to send an email from the web page. It could be to anyone you choose, and it could also have an attachment if I had chosen to combine it with the Upload a File example. The Upload a File example allows you to upload a file from your computer to the web site. The Download a File example allows you to do the opposite-but not by clicking on a link. This method of downloading is of interest if you don’t want the downloader to know the location of the file, e.g. if you want to only let them download after they have paid for the file.

The Crystal Report example displays a database style report on a web page. The mailing labels report is a specialized version of such report that would allow you to print one page at a time of labels from the web site (this idea needs a bit of work yet to be made practical).

The Get Web Page example simply scrapes the source code from any web page you indicate. The Address Checker example accesses the Post Office site to check an address and put it in standardized form. The Miscellaneous example contains several small applications that test out various methods of inserting information into a web page.

Before VS .Net, I had done essentially everything above by using either ASP pages with VB script or by using ISAPI DLLs created with Delphi. The advantage of VS .Net is the ease with which it let me do these things-once I had figured out how to do some basic things in the new environment.

Don’t expect to see any of this on the web soon, since at present the only place I can run VS .Net web applications is on my own computer, which is fine since I need to do a lot more learning before going live.

As for regular Windows desktop programs created in VS .Net, they will have to wait to be seen away from my computer also, since I will continue to use either Visual Basic or Delphi to write them for anyone else other than myself. u