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Beta 1 Release
March 10, 1997
This overview of the Web Wizard SDK is provided in question-and-answer format.
What is a Web wizard?
Which types of content can be authored with a Web
wizard?
Can third parties build Web
wizards? Which tools can they use to build them?
How do Web wizards relate to Web
design-time controls?
A Web wizard is a Web site development aide that can visually step the user through a series of steps, and then automatically generate parts of a Web site, or a completely new Web site, based on the user's options. Most users and developers are familiar with the many wizards that ship in various Microsoft® products, from Microsoft Office to Microsoft visual development tools. Web wizards work in the same way, but focus on creating Web content. Web wizards will be able to run as stand-alone programs and can also be accessed from Visual InterDev™ (from the Wizard dialog) so that Visual InterDev developers can easily invoke them directly from the development environment.
Web wizards can automatically publish content to a Web server over HTTP, and create FrontPage™ 97 and Visual InterDev projects so that users can further customize and manage the content. For an example of what a Web wizard can do, look no further than the Data Form Wizard that is part of Visual InterDev. This wizard lets the developer quickly create highly customized HTML forms that are bound to databases. Using the Web Wizard SDK, solution providers and software vendors can easily extend Visual InterDev with wizards that provide a wide range of functionality -- generating anything from an ecommerce Web site to a messaging Web site that might integrate with systems such as Microsoft Exchange.
A wizard can author any of the following types of information:
Yes, they can. The purpose of the Web Wizard SDK is to enable a wide range of third-party solution providers and software vendors to build Web tools that can provide dramatic benefits to users.
The specifications in the Web Wizard SDK will provide background information on Web wizards and how they can be constructed. The Web wizard framework was designed and written to be used with Visual Basic® 5.0 to quickly and easily construct wizards. However, Web wizards can be written using any development tool that can create OLE Automation Servers, including:
Design-time controls are COM-based Web authoring components that are currently supported in Visual InterDev, and will also be supported by a wide range of HTML editors, including a future version of the Microsoft FrontPage editor. Design-time controls can be used as building blocks for wizards. For example, the Data Form Wizard for Visual InterDev uses the Data Range Header control (a design-time control) to automatically generate the database logic for the HTML forms the wizard builds.
| Comparison points | Web wizard | Web design- time control |
|---|---|---|
| Creates HTML and Active Server Pages | Yes | Yes |
| Creates multiple pages or entire sites | Yes | No |
| Based on COM -- easy to build, share, and host | Yes | Yes |
| Plugs into Visual InterDev | Yes | Yes |
| Runs as a stand-alone application | Yes | No |
| Can contain design-time controls | Yes | Yes |
| Re-entrant | No* | Yes |
*DTCs contained in wizards provide some re-entrancy.
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