The Brick Calculator component is a Windows Script Component (WSC), written using the Windows Script Component Wizard and Notepad. WSCs are an ideal way to prototype components, allowing us to write the components using VBScript or JScript, which means that they can be written in a matter of minutes.

ASP is a relatively new technology, but people have been building network-based applications for many years. To help us see where our components fit, it's worth taking a look at the options available for network development as whole, since the same considerations will be relevant when it comes to designing our component-based solutions.

Components come in all manner of different types. To try to get an idea of the range of tasks that could be performed using custom-designed components, it can be useful to categorize components according to their nature.

In this section we'll use a custom-built component in an ASP page. We'll begin by looking at how to call components from ASP. It's likely that you'll have done something like this before during your time as an ASP developer, but you may not have completely understood the detail of what your code was up to.

One of the key characteristics of all COM components is that they are able to perform tasks for us without telling us how the task is going to be performed. To achieve this, the component must give us clearly defined information saying what the component can do, what type of information it expects us to pass, and what it will return when the task is complete.

As our customers, our managers and the sales team ask for increasingly complex applications, the demands made of software developers are growing at an ever-increasing rate. Lately, the vogue for companies, quite rightly, has been to automate their business processes. Now the drive is to integrate all of these disparate systems together, often with the addition of a web interface so that access to these products and services is more widely available.

Sometimes fields of a record contain no data or a NULL. A person may not have a phone number, or a member is registered with a title and last name but no first name. HTML tables will not automatically give you an empty cell to represent NULL data.

By building a table that displays the first five records of a recordset, we get some idea of the techniques and practice with the HTML codes for tables. However, most of the time you will have no idea of how many records are in your recordset - so you won't know how many times to repeat the loop. ADO provides a way to test whether you are at the end of the records, and thus should stop building rows. The property to use is called EOF (which is short for 'End Of File').

Very frequently your client will want to place data into an HTML table, for display of the browser.

In the last section we discussed obtaining data from fields. But which record was providing the data? Were we on the first record, the last or somewhere in between?

One of my sailing coaches emphasized that yacht races are won or lost long before the day of the race. Regattas are won during the months of preparation and training prior to the starting gun. Just as in ADO the prepartion process is important.

To start our series of articles on Active Server Pages, we introduce you to the technology and give you the guidelines to get started. Also we round things off with a couple of Active Server Page examples to get you tempted.

To accompany the up and coming Active Server Page tutorials on the Workshop we would like to introduce you to DomainDLX who are providing FREE website hosting which supports Active Server Pages.

You must of heard the term Active Serve Pages or ASP? In this article we take a look to discover what they actually are and do.