Our mandate was to create an easy to use, attractive application for finding an displaying information. The application itself was created to be completely separate from the content it displayed so that multiple content sets could be presented with the same application. Currently the base technology for this application is being used for three families of applications. The Tech Ed 1995 CD-ROM is in one of those families. The Education and Certification Roadmap, also on the Tech Ed CD-ROM is in another of these families. The third family is the electronic version of the Microsoft Press® Running Series. The system is being used for a total of more than a dozen titles.
To accomplish our mandate, we used a Visual Basic application in conjunction with an Access database. We augmented Visual Basic Pro with a number of custom controls. In our system, authoring is a matter of correctly and efficiently loading the database full of content and pointers to content. Presentation is a matter of correctly and efficiently bringing content out of the database and on to the computer screen.