The project presented in this chapter creates an intranet newsletter for a hypothetical company's internal use. The project allows employees to "subscribe" to the newsletter through the Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 browser. The newsletter is distributed periodically through the interoffice email system, which can be Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Mail. The subscriptions are registered in an ODBC datasource with the Internet Database Connector (IDC) that is associated with the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). The newsletter is distributed to the circulation list by means of a separate Visual Basic application.
The discussion of this project assumes that you are familiar with Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 and the use of custom controls. You should also be familiar with Microsoft Windows NT Server and Microsoft Windows 95. In this chapter we also assume that you are building the solution directly on a Windows NT server. However, it is possible to construct the necessary files on a computer using Windows 95 and then transfer them to a Windows NT server for final configuration and testing. No matter which method you use, it is a good idea to have Visual Basic installed on the server so that changes can be made on the server.