Windows CGI gained its popularity because it uses Visual Basic. Armed with some basic HTML knowledge, a programmer using Visual Basic can be turned into a Windows CGI developer in days. How Windows CGI Works Figure 1 shows the basic architecture of a Windows CGI application. The server receives it, determines that a Windows CGI program needs to be run, and writes the information to an input file. This program reads the input file, does the necessary processing, writes the output to an output file, and terminates itself.
Several points are worth noting here.
Under a multithreading operating system such as Windows NT, each process runs in its own memory space, and having many executable programs running on your Web server at the same time is inefficient. Second, the Web server and Windows CGI programs communicate with one another through input and output files. The input file uses the Windows INI file format. Microsoft provides special Win32 API calls to allow quick access to INI files. In the early days when there was no COM or DCOM, passing information back and forth using INI files was a great idea.