Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology has become wildly popular with web developers. However, the techniques for developing custom ASP components, not to mention the inevitable snags and pitfalls, are not well documented. What's more, the successful ASP component developer must be a jack-of-all-trades, with some knowledge of COM and COM+, threading models, and the ASP object model, as well as a mastery of one or more language tools and development environments. That's where Developing ASP Components, 2nd Edition, comes in. Its first section explores the topics everyone needs to know to develop effective ASP components:

* Configuring the ASP development environment.
* ASP components and the Component Object Model (COM).
* ASP components and threading models.
* ASP components and Component Services, which provide a variety of services to ASP components.
* The objects, properties, methods, and events available in the ASP object model.

ASP components are language independent, and developers increasingly tend to use more than a single language tool. Thus the remainder of the book focuses on ASP component development using one of two major development tools - Microsoft Visual Basic and Microsoft Visual C++ (with the ActiveX Template Library) - along with a number of other languages, such as Perl and Delphi. Each section focuses on the issues that concern the ASP component developer using that particular development environment. These issues include:

* Accessing ASP's intrinsic objects.
* Accessing data using ADO.
* Creating n-tier web applications with VB.
* Handling persistence using MFC along with Visual C++/ATL.

It's this strong focus on two major development environments, along with a thorough grounding in essential ASP topics, that makes Developing ASP Components the definitive resource for the ASP application and component developer.