Chapter 21. Active Server Pages Crash Course

IN THIS CHAPTER

You'll never bother or you'll use it all the time: Active Server Pages, Microsoft's scripted Web pages, provides a powerful way to create administrative Web pages and user self-service pages. Although making you a full ASP programmer is beyond the scope of this book, there's plenty of power available to you through the VBScript that you've already learned.

Web pages are still the hottest technology around, especially with the recent hype about Web Services and other new Web-based technologies. Web pages can have a place in administration, too. I'm not talking about creating full-fledged Web applications (although you certainly could do so by using VBScript), but you can create some great administrative utilities that are based upon Web pages. Consider the following useful, easy-to-create solutions:

• A Web page that allows Help Desk technicians to quickly check the status of a particular user account

• A Web page that retrieves inventory information about client computers on the network

• A Web page that allows users to reset their own passwords by providing some piece of personally identifiable information

The keys to the kingdom are Active Server Pages, or ASP, Microsoft's scripted Web development environment.