Active Server Pages Training: Intermediate ASP with VBScript

Outline (happily customized upon request)

• Error handling strategies
• Using Option Strict and Option Explicit to preempt some potential coding errors
• Catching errors that occur
• Implementing centralized error handling and intelligent error response
• Handling user input errors, file errors, components errors, and data access errors
• Advanced form and data validation with regular expressions
• Overview: why use regular expressions instead of string functions for form and data validations?
• Hands-on primer on all key regular expression syntax (I've taught regular expressions for eight years and have a superb technique that gets students up and running with regular expressions in less than an hour.)
• Using regular expressions to find string patterns and subpatterns (great for validating whether fields in your form have been filled out correctly)
• Using regular expressions to replace patterns (useful for cleaning up user input and invalid data)
• File IO (how to have ASP read from and write to files)
• Introducing the Scripting.FileSystemObject
• Working with files
• Detecting whether a file exists
• Reading data from a file and using it in your ASP program
• Writing or appending data to your file
• Copying, moving, renaming, and deleting files
• Working with directories
• Detecting whether a directory exists
• Creating directories programmatically
• Copying, moving, renaming, and deleting directories
• Setting user permissions on directories
• Working with XML (Extensible Markup Language) in ASP
• Overview of XML and the roles of core XML technologies
• XML
• DTD (Document Type Definition)
• XML Schema
• XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) and XPath
• The role of the MSXML 4.0 parser in ASP applications
• Reading and parsing data from an XML-based configuration file using the XML DOM (Document Object Model)
• Validating and processing an order received via XML
• Generating XML from ASP based on a DTD
• Transforming XML data with XSLT (XSL Transformation)
• ASP Authentication and Authorization
• Overview of models for IIS (Internet Information Services) user authentication and their pros/cons
• Anonymous access
• Basic authentication
• Digest authentication
• Windows (integrated) authentication
• Logging on a user via an authentication model and authorizing/controlling access to resources based on their role
• Overview of certificates and Microsoft Passport (could be expanded to full, hands-on sections upon request)
• Conclusion