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Welcome to my ASP & COM pages

Just a few words...

Since I was working on Microsoft Active Server Pages ® technology, I decided to look into COM components that could be used from within ASP. ASP is good for simple functionality and some simple manipulations. It is good for overall web design tasks like designing your site navigation, non-intensive & non-repetitive data access, etc. The scripting paradigm allows you to quickly try out things and make changes relatively quickly and easily. Also it is quite simple to learn.

But when you want to do some computationally intensive tasks, say, like a lot of number crunching, then passing over that function to a COM objects makes more sense. The advantages are quick results and faster executing ASP pages. Afterall, ASP is interpreted and it cannot match the performance you get from a native compiled executable.

My self learning process

I went through several web sites and looked for examples, tutorials and books. I found that almost all of them showed you how to build COM ® components using Microsoft Visual Basic ®. I have nothing against Microsoft Visual Basic ® but you cannot learn the details of what is happening under the hood. Hence I decided to learn building COM components using Visual C++®. This would help me learn COM (much more in details than the basic concepts I already knew) and the Microsoft Active Template Library ®(ATL).

To learn COM I came across a good book Beginning ATL COM 3 Programming by Richard Grimes (Wrox Press). Simultaneously, I was consulting the Visual C++ based ASP COM component chapters from another good book Developing ASP Components by Shelley Powers (O'Reilly). I also went through the Microsoft MSDN ® area and found a lot of useful information. Another good book I would recommend as your starting point for COM and ATL is Active Template Library - A Developer's Guide by Tom Armstrong (IDG Books). This book explains everything about COM in a very simple and straightforward manner. In case you need to brush up your C++ then C++ How to Program (Second Edition) by Dietel & Deitel is a good book.

The first tutorial: Web Form Processing

I experimented with all the samples that I could lay my hands on. I decided to build a simple HTML form processing component that can be used in ASP pages. Though this may not have a immediate practical use or might seem trivial, I am sure you can get a fair idea of how to process a form submission using a ASP COM component. Despite the ASP Request object available via VBScript, I am showing you form processing via COM. Maybe you can use this combined with other database code to insert values in database tables on a high transaction site. Maybe you can add some more features or functionality to this. Do let me know if you come up with something.

Please note that this a work in progress. I am updating this web site as I continue to learn. Sothere will be some shortcomings on this topic. Please point these out. Also do not follow my work word-for-word in your production level code.

Infact, I want to include links or articles on my web site of other developers out there who wish to share their experience and knowledge in this area.

Click here to continue to the tutorial