As far as I am concerned, the Data Environment (and its Designer) associated with VB6 is a graphical representation of a concept that can be designed entirely in code. I am sure that historically the code came first then Microsoft built this GUI in order to "help" me. But, as usual, I am working backwards: the Data Environment Designer has shown me how to build a similar solution in code. The advantage of building a code-only Data Environment is portability. I can easily transfer this solution to from VB to ASP:

The Data Environment stores all of the data access objects (stored procedures and T-SQL) in one logical location for my convenience. In the world of ASP, I use an ASP include file to store all such "objects" as string literals in the Session object.

The Data Environment uses several dialogs (Property Pages) as a generic way to handle parameterized queries. In the world of ASP, I use the '?' character and the Replace method of the VBA Library in my own generic functions.