Island Hopper News is a fictional online newspaper designed for publication on the Web. It serves as a sample application included in Microsoft® Visual Studio® to teach n-tier application development for the enterprise. While it includes sections on local, national, and international news, only its classified advertisements have been developed for Visual Studio 6.0.
Customers access Island Hopper News through a Web site where they view and place classified ads. Island Hopper News employees update customer records, invoices, and payments using a Win32® client application developed in Microsoft Visual Basic® that runs in Windows® 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT®.
The following topics highlight some of the more interesting design features in Island Hopper News:
Island Hopper News is primarily an application written to teach the fundamentals of Windows DNA development. It implements a relatively simple architecture to solve a business problem that exists in an idealistic context. As you develop applications in a production environment, you will undoubtedly evolve more sophisticated techniques and take advantage of more features of Microsoft technologies than Island Hopper News does.
For very detailed discussions of Island Hopper News design and implementation, see Mary Kirtland's book Designing Component-Based Applications, published in December 1998 by Microsoft Press®.