Web Page

Task:

Make a class called student where the properties are name, age, and school.

A. Develop a Contact Manager application that includes at least five of your friends or classmates.

B. Try inserting correct and incorrect dates into the application when age is a public variable. Switch age to a private variable and try inserting both correct and incorrect dates again. What differences do you see? Would you make age a private or a public variable? Why?

Use Visual InterDev as an editing tool to create the application. Visual InterDev is available as part of the MSDN.

Help & Directions

Thinking OOP - Object Oriented Programming

OOP is not about programming as much as it is about thinking in a specific way. When you think of an object, you should see it as a set of properties and methods. Properties are the data, and methods are what you do to the data.
What is empowering about OOP is that once you have made a class, the specific instances of that class can be customized to create an object. Your text suggests that you think of a class as a template or pattern, and that you think of an object as what you actually build or make with the template.

Some Advice: There are a lot of fancy terms used in this chapter like class, method, object, variable, etc. I sometimes find it easier to sketch out the words or create a little cheat sheet for myself when learning new terms. This could be done in a traditional manner with a glossary or as a diagram where the words are grouped and relationships are drawn in.

In order to make a class, you use the class-end class syntax that appears as follows:

Class classnamehere
'Class statements
End Class

This is all it takes to make a simple class. However, there are properties of the class that you have to consider when making the class. An unlimited number of properties can be part of the class.

When setting the properties of the class, you can set the scope of the data as either private or public. By creating encapsulated code, you can control what information in your script is available to the outside world to see.

As you can see, creating and defining class gives you a powerful way to create and exchange information using ASP and vb-script. However, there are limitations to what you can accomplish using vb-script.

When you hit the limitations of vb-script, there are two ways around it.

One is to create custom classes using either VB or C++.
The other is to take advantage of the add-on objects known as ActiveX Components that reside in the ActiveX DLLs and ActiveX EXE object libraries. You can use these components to extend the functionality of vb-script.

These components contain some of the most common things that a web developer would want to create on a web site ... things such as having an advertisement rotator, or a page counter, or even a logging utility. All you need to do is install the components and register in the server's Windows NT registry.