Visual Basic Concepts

Beginning Your IIS Application Project

See Also

When you begin an IIS application, you select a special type of project called an IIS Application. An IIS Application project is an ActiveX DLL project type that automatically includes an instance of the appropriate ActiveX designer. The designer, called a WebClass object, acts as the base on which you create your application.

The Webclass designer corresponds to a single webclass in your application, but it can contain multiple HTML templates and webitems. If you want to include more than one webclass in your application, you can insert additional designers into your project.

There are several properties that you should always set for the webclass.

• StateManagement — This property, available for the webclass object in the Properties window, determines whether your webclass stays alive between browser requests or is destroyed at the completion of each request.
  
  
• Public — Your webclass must be set to public in order for the application to run. This is controlled by the Public property, available for the webclass object in the Properties window. By default, the Public property is set to True.
  
  
• Unattended Execution — Your webclass must be set to allow unattended execution. Setting this option allows the webclass to be run as an apartment-model object and causes all run-time errors to be written to an event log instead of a prompt. Check Unattended Execution on the General tab of the Project Properties dialog box.
  
  
• Retained in Memory — This option, available in the Project Properties dialog box for your IIS applications, allows the Visual Basic project to keep its run-time support state permanently loaded on the server's threads, allowing server programs that load Visual Basic projects to run significantly faster.

To begin your IIS application

1. Start a new project and select IIS Application as your project type.
   
   
2. In the Project Explorer window, open the Designers folder, then double-click on the designer to display it in the main window.

Note   Webclass names are case insensitive. You cannot rename a webclass to the same name it had previously, changing only the case.

To add additional webclass designers to your project

• On the Project menu, click Add Webclass and Visual Basic adds it to your project.

  Note   The first four kinds of ActiveX designers loaded for a project are listed on the Project menu. If more than four designers are loaded, the later ones will be available from the More ActiveX Designers submenu on the Project menu.

For More Information   See "State Management in IIS Applications" for more information on setting the StateManagement property for your webclass. Also see "Public Property" in the Language Reference.