February 24, 2000

Use the HTML Help Treeview Applet for Site Navigation

A treeview control helps users navigate a large site because they can expand and collapse nodes to keep the view manageable. A good example is the Microsoft Developer Network Online Library. You can get a free treeview applet from Microsoft. The applet is bundled with the HTML Help Workshop. You

Julian (Ordinal) Date

Question: Is there an easy function to get the Julian (Ordinal) date of a date? For example 015 from 01/15/2000. Answer: Try subtracting December 31st of the previous year from the current date, and tell DateDiff to give you the result in days. That will give you the correct result.

Netscape Does Not Support VBScript

Question: I recently rewrote my entire Web site using frames and VBScript to load the appropriate pages into the proper frame. My Web site looked fine in Internet Explorer, but in Netscape Navigator 4.5, it gave me “JavaScript” errors and the frames would not load the pages as they did

Assign Zero or NULL to a Pointer

Question: To initialize a pointer after deleting it, should I assign a NULL to it or zero? Are they the same in C++? I know strictly speaking, I should assign NULLs to deleted pointers. But the app I work with uses zeros instead. I wonder if I need to change

Visual Basic 6.0 Versus Visual InterDev 6.0

Question: How does Web development with Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual InterDev 6.0 differ? Which tool is better for Web development and why? Answer: Both products can help you arrive at a similar final destination (i.e., dynamically generated pages and DHTML), but I recommend Visual InterDev 6.0 over Visual Basic

Which Scripting Language Should We Use?

Question: We are in the process of putting up two service portals, which may have business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. We are confused as to which scripting language we should use. We have zeroed in on Active Server Pages (ASP) as the Web programming environment and Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 as