Visual Studio 2005 Express – 6 – RAD – IronSpeed

This video tutorial will demonstrate how to use Rapid Application Development (RAD) software. We will be using the free version of IronSpeed Designer to automatically generate the visual basic application from a database.
photo credit: Howard Kang

The first thing we will do is go over the prerequisite software. If you do not already have it, you need:

1) Internet Information Services (IIS) or ASP.NET Development Server- IIS is a personal web server that comes with Windows XP Pro (it is not included in the Home Edition). ASP.NET Devopment Server is a free personal development server that comes with SDK version of Net Framework 2.0. You can download ASP.NET Development Server here.
2) SQL Server 2005 Express and Management Studio for SQL Server – see the post on Installing SQL Server.
3) Iron Speed Designer – there is a free trial version that never expires that you can download.

Then, we will build a small table that contains people’s names and phone numbers. We will call the table Contact. After building the table, we will use Iron Speed Designer to generate the VB source code for the application.

If you really want to learn the details of programming with Visual Studio, I highly recommend the series from Learn Visual Studio. They offer several videos for free to try it out. I personally have a Lifetime Subscription and have spent 100s of hours watching their videos. Most live training classes and video tutorials for Visual Studio cost around $25 per hour (see AppDev.com, Learnkey.com, etc.), but Learn Visual Studio only costs about 70 cents per hour of video. Also, if you want to save 30% off the retail price of Learn Visual Studio, please click on the link provided at the beginning of this paragraph.

There is an index of over 700 video tutorials on various programming languages and databases at this post.