IIS stands for Internet Information Server.  An IIS Application is an application that is run by IIS that will capture the requests and responses from Web pages. IIS Applications are similar in concept to ASP, however IIS Applications are built with Visual Basic and compiled whereas ASP are built using Visual Interdev (or a text editor) and interpreted.

An IIS Application consists of code modules just like any other Visual Basic application. The modules that know how to respond to IIS requests are a special type of class module called a webclass. So IIS Applications are frequently referred to as webclasses.

If you have done any ASP development, you know that one of the most common things Web-based applications do is to write HTML that will be displayed in the end-user's browser. The same is true in your IIS Applications.

Instead of coding all of the HTML tags within your IIS Application, you can use an HTML file. So you (or someone else) can build an HTML page using an editor such as Notepad or FrontPage to build the basics of a Web page. Your IIS application can then use that page as a template, adding other tags to it to complete the page in preparation for display in the end-user's browser.

Here are some tips in working with HTML templates:

• You can add replacement tags in the HTML template and replace the tag within the IIS Application. These tags are frequently referred to as webclass tags and are prefixed with "wc". For example, you have a billing form that wants to display something like this: "Your order will be shipped to: " and then the person's address. You could add the standard text to the HTML template along with a <wcAddress> tag. In the IIS Application, the template has a ProcessTag event that provides you with the tag name and allows you to provide the appropriate tag contents. The IIS Application then automatically places the webclass tag with the contents that you specified.