I just completed a tutorial I started about 5 years ago. It will cover how to build "classic ASP" pages. Even though the world is using DOT.NET these days, there are still a humungous number of systems that use the "classic ASP" - which in many ways is easier than .NET.
I wrote my entire back-end shopping cart system back in the laste 90's using Classic ASP and Visual Interdev. (This site is PHP-Fusion, but when you click "Online Store" you are taken to my shopping cart site.) Over the years it has grown to a whopping 541 .ASP scripts or programs. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It would cost me one or two months of my time to rewrite this system in .NET. So I'm sure there are many companies that need maintenance programmers on their old classic ASP systems.
Microsoft offers a total of about 30 days of training to full learn .NET. So in my humble opinion, if you need a quick dynamic web page, classic ASP might be for you. This would especially apply if you are a Windows adminstator and need to build some simple pages. Your goal is not to become a profesisonal .NET programmer - juts to get the job done and impress your boss, right?
I suggest you take my two days of VB/Script first, then you will already be comfortable with the VB/Script language. Classic ASP server script can run with either VB/Script or JavaScript (or even other scripting engines that may be installed on your server). My guess is that 90% or more of classic ASP pages are built with VB/Script.
One of the downsides of using Classic ASP is that you do need to know the basics of HTML. Even though Visual Interdev has a designer tab where you can drag and drop controls, you still might need to "tweak" the HTML or understand what's going on behind the scenes. Often, you will generate HTML using the VB/Script code (we actually give you a glimpse of this in the 2-day VB/Script class).
You might ask. Neal, if I already can build HTML with VB/Script running on my computer, why would I want to run the script on a web server? The answer is that maybe you have created a cool report, but suppose other people need to run it or view the results. Instead of distributing the code to 100 people, you could just send them to your web page. From there, you can prompt them for parameters and build them a custom report. The source code stays on your IIS server, and they never see it and you don't have to explain them how to run it. Any userids or passwords can remain on the server, so your script can access secured resources, and you don't have to give out the userid/password.
The video run-time is over 8 hours, this is the equivalent material taught in a 3-day instructor lead course. Neal has learned from dozens of students what confuses them the most, and has included videos to avoid all the confusions.
Click here for the the printable course outline
Click here to the shopping cart
Click here for Sample Videos
