Understanding the Windows Scripting Host
One of Windows’s most notable deficiencies when compared with other operating systems is its lack of a batch language for automating tasks. Although the underlying MS-DOS supports batch files, they are of little use in the Windows environment: under Windows 3.1 you can’t even launch Windows programs from batch files. Support staff wishing to automate tasks for their users have been forced to use third-party tools like Wilson WinBatch or JP Software’s Take Command. Because these tools are not part of Windows, they must be separately installed before they can be used. Licensing of these toolsmeans that additional costs are often incurred, which, if the budget is not available, becomes a problem.
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Getting Started with ActiveX Automation Using VB.NET
ActiveX Automation, also known as COM (Common Object Model) or simply Automation, is a Microsoft standard for interaction between Windows programs. The standard enables one application to use the functions of another application in such a smoothly integrated way that the two programs appear to be a single program. The former application is known as the client and the latter is called the server.
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The Zimbra AJAX Toolkit (AjaxTK) A Toolkit for Developing Rich, Browser-based Applications
Since the launch of the Web, application developers have faced a trade-off between “thick” client applications (such as those based on PowerBuilder, VisualBasic, and .NET) and “thin” client applications that run in a web browser and have traditionally consisted of HTML pages constructed by a web application server via technologies such as JSP, ASP, or PHP. While webbased applications have freed developers from the need to provision, update, and secure software on the client, they have not, at least as of yet, provided the richness of thick clients. That gap in user experience between web-based and native clients has been closing with the introduction of technologies like Dynamic HTML (DHTML), which combines JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets within web pages. With the recent emergence of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), the gap is closer to disappearing altogether.
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Programming Acrobat JavaScript Using Visual Basic
Acrobat 7.0 provides a rich set of JavaScript programming interfaces that are designed to be used from within the Acrobat environment. It also provides a mechanism (known as JSObject) that allows external clients to access the same functionality from environments such as Visual Basic.
This document gives you the information you need to get started using the extended functionality of JavaScript from a Visual Basic programming environment. It provides a set of examples to illustrate the key concepts.
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Visual Basic 9 Introduction
When people hear “Visual Basic”, they remember QuickBasic from the DOS days. As a result, their knee-jerk reaction is- often that Visual Basic is not really a serious language, and- they do not pay it the attention it actually deserves. In reality- Visual Basic is a full-edged modern object-oriented language-with many unique features, such as static typing where possible but dynamic typing where necessary, declarative event handling, deep XML integration with optional layered XSD types, highly expressive query comprehension syntax, type inference, etc. etc. This makes Visual Basic actually more interesting- to researchers and practitioners than the “popular” static languages such as Java, C# and dynamic languages such as Ruby or JavaScript.
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