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Visual Basic
What is Visual Basic?
Visual Basic is a "visual programming" environment for developing
Windows (also Web now) applications. Visual Basic makes it possible to develop complicated
applications very quickly. The programmer designs windows graphically, drags program
elements from the Visual Basic Toolbox and writes basic code for each element. Visual
Basic is "event-driven" which means that procedures are
called automatically when the end user chooses menu items, clicks the mouse, moves
objects on the screen, etc.
Why is Visual Basic popular?
Programmers have undergone a major change in many years of programming various machines.
For example, what could take days to create an application in other programming languages
like C, C++ could be done in hours with Visual Basic. Visual Basic provides many interesting
sets of tools to aid us in building exciting applications. Visual Basic provides these
tools to make our life far more easier because all the real hard code is already written
for us.
Visual Basic is not only a programming language but also a true graphical development
environment. This environment allows programmers with little programming experience
to quickly develop powerful Windows applications. Visual Basic also has the ability
to develop programs that can be used as a front-end application to a database system,
serving as the user interface which collects user input and displays formatted output
in a more appealing and useful form.
Visual Basic is very popular for the ease with which it allows the programmer to create
nice looking graphical programs with less coding unlike many other languages that
take thousands of lines of programmer keyed code. As the programmer works in the graphical
environment much of the program code is automatically generated by the Visual Basic
program.
Areas of Use
Using Visual Basic's tools we can quickly translate an abstract idea into a program
design that we can actually see on the screen. VB encourages you to experiment, revise,
correct, and network your design until the new project meets your requirements. However,
most of all, it inspires your imagination and creativity. Visual Basic is ideal for
developing applications that run on the Windows operating system. Developing applications
with VB can be said to be a 3-step approach:
i) Design the appearance of application
ii) Assign property settings to the objects of the program
iii) Write the code to direct specific tasks at runtime
Visual Basic is used to develop applications in a number of different areas. Some
of them are listed below:
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Accounting
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Business
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Commerce
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Consulting
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Education
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Law
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Marketing and Sales
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Medicine
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Research
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Science
Many of the things that we do with Visual Basic really aren’t very basic. The Visual
Basic language is powerful, if you can imagine a programming task, it can be accomplished
using Visual Basic.
History of Visual Basic
Microsoft first released Visual Basic in 1987. It was the first visual development
tool from Microsoft, and it was to compete with C, C++, Pascal and other well-known
programming languages. From the start, Visual Basic wasn't a hit. It wasn't until
release 2.0 that people really discovered the potential of the language, and with
release 3.0 it had become the fastest-growing programming language on the market.
Below is the order and the approximate year in which a new version of Visual Basic
was released:
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1991, VB1 Debuts
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1992, VB2 Debuts
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1993, VB3 Debut
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1996, VB4 Debuts
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1997, VB5 Debuts
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1998, VB6 Debuts
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2001, VB. NET Debuts
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