August 2, 1999

Rediscover the FrontPage Server Administrator

After upgrading your system to FrontPage 2000, you may get an error message when you try to run the FrontPage Server Administrator from the Windows NT Option Pack group. The FP Server Administrator has been moved alongside the Internet Service Manager (ISM) in the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) as a

Guidelines for developing COM components that need to talk to VB

It is useful to follow these guidelines when you develop COM components that need to talk to VB. 1. Only use VARIANT data types in your interface . Although VB canhandle more complex data types, using just VARIANT lets the components be used by less sophisticated automation clients like vbscrip,

Use REFIID instead of const IID&

Because GUID are 16 bytes in size, you don’t want to pass them by value. Instead, you should pass them by reference. This is why Queryinterface takes a constant reference. If you get tired of writing const IID&, you can always use the equivalent expression REFIID. You can also use

Use Connection Pooling to Enhance Performance

You can experience a great increase in database performance if you utilize connection pooling. Creating a connection to a database takes a lot of time and resources. If every you create a connection instance for every page, a new connection must be created and then deleted once the page executes.

Quick-Start XML

o, you’ve been too busy earning an honest living to get into XML, and your data couldn’t be more disorganized. Don’t worry, because building upon the Visual Basic skills you already possess, you’ll learn XML (eXtensible Markup Language) in no time, and everything will be tidy again. We’ll begin right

Communicate With the Server Using XMLHTTP

f you’ve been working with Extensible Markup Language (XML) anytime lately, you’ve probably realized what a powerful language it can be. You can do all kinds of interesting perambulations to change your XML into HTML, filter and sort it, and if you’re running Internet Explorer 5.0, even use the XML

Creating Your Own Identity (or What Does it Mean to Be Normal?)

n this month’s 10-Minute Solution, I’ll try to combine some database theory with a few of the practices I’ve touched upon in earlier Solutions. The older material was about update triggers; this month I’ll discuss one use for them. Normalization is kind of a “least cost method” for determining the