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Small Online Retailers Can Take Credit Cards       Vantage Services Inc. offers a credit card authorization system for small online retailers. Size does matter when it comes to credit, banking, and sales, particularly in the emerging global Internet economy, and qualifying for a credit card merchant account is the ticket to the competitive e-commerce game. Yet many marketers are turned down because of either their location, their credit sales volume, or the age of their business. Vantage, a fully automated credit card e-commerce system that does not require merchants to have their own merchant accounts, is now available to help bridge this gap. Vantage is configured to directly access VanCart, a secure shopping cart that is then linked to the small, online merchant's Web site. VanCart also provides merchants with back office management tools, support, and password access for tracking orders and customer activity. Vantage Services Inc. 50 Fullerton Court Suite 102 Sacramento, CA 95825 916-927-3298 http://www-agency.com/CreditCard.htm Visual Basic Year 2000 Solution       Class Solutions Limited is now shipping Visual DateScope 2000 version 2.0, a developer's toolkit designed to aid in Year 2000 conversion of systems developed specifically in Microsoft® Visual Basic®. It's a natural assumption that a new language like Visual Basic will produce Year 2000-ready code, but since the implementation of the language is left up to individual programmers, there's no guarantee. The Visual DateScope 2000 toolkit aids the conversion engineer by automating the tasks that would otherwise require manual intervention. It also offers support for impact analysis, remediation, and testing. Visual DateScope 2000 has a built-in Visual Basic parsing engine that understands the language, rather than relying on text searches. Visual DateScope 2000 version 2.0 provides enhanced functionality and additional features designed to minimize the time spent on performing Year 2000 conversion and testing. Class Solutions Ltd. Frerichs House, Blenheim Gardens Wickford, Essex SS 12 9QD United Kingdom +44-1702-480675 fax +44-1702-480676 http://www.class-solutions.com Mimic the Microsoft Office 97 Toolbar       Sheridan Software Systems recently introduced Active ToolBars, which enable software developers to create applications that mimic the look and functionality of the toolbars and menubars provided in Microsoft Office 97. Toolbars and menubars appear at design time the same way they will appear at runtime, saving several steps in creating an application. The import/export configuration allows developers and users to create and modify both toolbars and menus. Features include multiple image sizes, multiple dockable toolstrips and menustrips that can be docked to a form or floated, sound effects that can be associated with menu choices, animated menus, and multiple display styles. Tooltips, grab functions, and keyboard shortcuts can be built in for additional ease of use. Active ToolBars contains a complete set of button styles needed for the creation of any application. It also includes 32-bit controls that will work with ActiveX®-compliant environments, specifically Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 and later, Visual Basic, and Visual C++®. Sheridan Software Systems Inc. 35 Pinelawn Road, Suite 206E Melville, NY 11747 800-VBDIRECT, 516-753-0985 http://www.shersoft.com Empress Upgrades Hypermedia       Empress Software is now shipping Empress Hypermedia V3, an Internet applications development toolkit for the Empress Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) user. Empress RDBMS is a powerful and cost-effective development database designed for embedded systems developers operating on Unix, Windows®, or real-time environments. Hypermedia V3 includes enhanced Perl and Tcl/Tk interfaces that can be used for connecting these scripting languages to Empress RDBMS. New features include the ability to directly embed SQL statements within other SQL statements in an HTML template, a quick method to check data input strings, and an easier method for connecting to the database by specifying connection information in an HTML tag. In addition, error log files generated by the toolkit can be kept separate from the HTTP system, giving developers a clean method of managing information. The Perl interface allows developers to directly embed Perl script into HTML files, while the Perl and Tcl/Tk interfaces make full client-server network architecture possible through the Empress ODBC Interface. Empress Software Inc. 6401 Golden Triangle Drive Greenbelt, MD 20770 301-220-1919 http://www.empress.com Create Rich Menus for Your Web Site       The SiteMenu ActiveX Control, now available from Quiksoft Corporation, creates navigational flyout or dropdown style menus right on your Web page. When users click on one of the menu items, they are taken directly to the corresponding URL. Because the items "fly out" and contract automatically, the menu takes up very little room on the page. SiteMenu controls work with any browser, not just browsers that support ActiveX. The menus can be easily created and customized by the site designer. The main menu is displayed from a bitmap created by the site designer, which allows the menu to blend into the overall site. The submenus are defined in a menu description file, created by the designer and downloaded by the control. The menu description file format is similar to HTML, which makes creating menus feel familiar. Quiksoft Corporation 501 Abbott Drive Broomall, PA 19008 800-509-8700 http://www.quiksoft.com/sitemenu Combine Components Across Platforms       SuperNova Inc. recently released SuperNova/Visual Concepts, which is designed to allow organizations to combine components written in any development language and deploy component-based applications across virtually any platform. SuperNova/Visual Concepts is based on SuperNova's core virtual machine technology, which lets the product incorporate components developed for more than 20 hardware and operating system platforms, and more then 25 commercial databases. Components can be written in any language that supports ActiveX, OLE/COM, or CORBA/IIOP, including Visual Basic, C, C++, Java, Delphi, PowerBuilder, or SuperNova/Application Developer. The product lets the developer combine components that originated in a variety of environments, mix and match component messaging protocols in a single application, and wrap legacy applications so they can be integrated as components and extended in functionality and data access. The development environment includes a graphical component repository that allows developers to quickly identify the components they need by language, platform, or business function, as well as an application modeling environment allowing the assembly of applications by simply dragging and dropping components. SuperNova Inc. 2025 Lincoln Highway Edison, NJ 08817 732-248-6667 http://www.supernova.com

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From the April 1998 issue of Microsoft Interactive Developer.