From now on this book will present several samples of scriptlets, both complex and simple. So it would be extremely helpful to have a tool to write them easily and quickly, or a series of facilities to save time and avoid the most boring coding tasks. Our opinion is that at the moment, and probably for a long time to come, the best development environment you can rely on for writing scriptlets is the Microsoft Developer Studio 97. It provides you with a cutting-edge text editor, syntax highlighting and a quick browser based on the Internet Explorer 4.0's WebBrowser component. What's better?
Also, Developer Studio 97—the version shipped with Visual Studio 97—allows you to fully customize its toolbars and menus. Add-ins and wizards complete the range of facilities you can exploit to adapt Developer Studio to suit all your needs. So, what then are our needs?
We want a wizard that can produce scriptlets and HTML test pages in an instant. Of course, we don't want a deaf and blind wizard, but a smart tool able to offer us some options and take these options carefully into account when producing code. However, such a wizard—even working perfectly—won't be enough.
Once we've finished with it, we're still far from having our scriptlet up and running. In fact, wizards are useful to start you off, but nothing more than that! We also need, therefore, some facilities to be available when editing HTML source code. Above all, we'd like to be able to test both the scriptlet and some sample pages in the same environment, and to do so as easily as clicking a toolbar button.
In this chapter, therefore, we're aiming to show you how to:
By the end of this chapter you will have a real and integrated development environment, where you can write your HTML components with the same ease as you're used to when writing C++ or Visual Basic code. For an explosive finish, we'll then be using the wizard (called, very imaginatively, scriptlet Wizard) to rebuild as a scriptlet the bitmapped anchor component we touched on in a previous chapter.