If you've already got a Web site or corporate Intranet bulging with data that is supplied via the Internet Data Connector (IDC) there is help available. IDC is an interface supplied with IIS that allows quite complex data retrieval from ODBC data sources, for use in a Web page. We discussed it briefly in Chapter 1, and we have no intention of covering it in depth. ASP is not only more powerful and efficient, but is also a lot easier to work with as well.
However, that doesn’t help you to convert existing IDC scripts and templates into ASP format. What does help, is the IDC2ASP tool that is available free of charge from Microsoft. It can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/NTServer/nts/downloads/archive/IISIDCHTXtoASP/readme.asp, and comes in two versions:
is a command-line utility that will convert IDC files into ASP form automatically. There are a series of command-line switches available that control all kinds of aspects of the conversion, and it leaves the original files intact so that you can test the new ones before committing yourself fully to the new technology.IDC2ASP.EXE
Alternatively, there is an active server component version of IDC2ASP, which can be instantiated within an ASP page, just like any other component. All that's needed then is to set its properties and call the
method.Convert
IDC2ASP carries the IntraActive name, and is not supported by Microsoft. However its potential usefulness makes it worth a try if you have a lot of IDC files to convert.