Introduction

The Internet has become vitally important for almost all businesses and is used for a very wide variety of applications. Some companies use it as a virtual telephone or video conferencing system, others use it for research, sales or delivering product. Almost everybody uses the Internet for electronic mail.

There are now thousands of commercial applications that work with the Internet. For example, there are dozens of email front-ends that provide different user interfaces to the same email protocol. Other applications are used to transfer files, access search engines to find information on the Web, or view messages on a public newsgroup.

Many of these applications are shareware and provide an excellent set of features but without the particular function you are looking for. If you are a company developer, you might prefer a commercial application with support, but cannot find one that provides the features. Alternatively, you might not like the way controls in an application work and would rather tailor these to your own use.

The Internet and Visual Basic

Visual Basic provides a great platform to solve almost any Internet application problem. It is very easy to create your own applications that look and work just the way you or your company likes. There is no real compromise on features, since a VB Internet application can provide all the features of most of the applications already available. For example, you can easily create an Internet email application. Web browser, file transfer utility, or newsgroup reader.

Where...