Visual Basic

Visual Basic (VB) is a programming language marketed by Microsoft Corporation. The system for connecting the programming language proper to the graphic user interface is a descendent of a system called Tripod, originally developed by Alan Cooper, and further developed by Cooper and his associates under contract to Microsoft. The internal language itself is a descendent of BASIC. It was first introduced by Microsoft in 1991 with the intention of making programing easier by having a visual basis for designing the user interface, and to some extent, the code.

It is an event driven programming language centered around a very powerful forms engine that enables rapid development of graphical user interface (GUI) applications and a complex database object library (ADO). It is used primarily for business applications such as database front ends, and its derivative VBScript is the default language for Active Server Pages.

Visual Basic is very friendly to the novice programmer. Its syntax tries to resemble the English language, it doesn't require the use of pointer arithmetic, and it has a vast library of utility objects to do everything from printing a Microsoft Word document to printing barcodes or displaying a web page.

A skilled programmer can "build" a web browser in minutes using components provided with Visual Basic. This use of built-in visual components and programming aids was an important factor in the acceptance of Visual Basic by programmers, and the use of visual components spread both to other programming languages and to web editors.

Visual Basic spawned the first commercially-viable reusable component market. There are literally thousands of 3rd party components available for sale today from hundreds of vendors.

Table of contents
1 Visual Basic for Applications
2 Criticisms of Visual Basic
3 Older Versions of Visual Basic
4 Visual Basic and HyperCard
5 See also
6 External links

Visual Basic for Applications

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is built into every product in the Microsoft Office family (Word, Excel, Access etc.), and also in several third-party products like Visio (now provided by Microsoft) and WordPerfect Office 2002. This makes Visual Basic the programming platform with the largest installed base in the world. This makes it an ideal tool for writing small applications for specific purposes. On the other hand, this fact made it possible that macro viruses written in VBA could spread out, even between the Apple Macintosh and the Microsoft Windows operating systems.

During the Internet boom, programmers were in great demand, and many new programmers entered the field. Friendliness toward novices was instrumental in Visual Basic becoming one of the most common languages in commercial use.

Visual Basic, however, is only available for Windows (a DOS version was marketed at one time). Writing programs in a platform-bound language surrenders portability.

Some products are available for other systems that can interpret a subset of the Visual Basic language or similarly target rapid application development. These products are not source-code compatible with Visual Basic, but the similarity of their design environments allows Visual Basic expertise to be leveraged into these environments quickly.

As businesses move their operations onto computer networks and Internet, Microsoft has added World Wide Web support into all of their development tools, with limited success and limited acceptance. Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) takes a stride in this direction by making VB a supported language for web application development (ASP.NET), and by providing support for web services, allowing remote functions to be called over the Internet as easily as functions on the local machine. VB.NET compiles to MSIL (a bytecode) that needs to be JITtedted the first time it is executed.

Criticisms of Visual Basic

Like all programming languages, Visual Basic has its disadvantages. Some complain that it creates bloated installations, is not fully object oriented, performs poorly at mathematical tasks, is unwieldy using out-of-process services, has an ugly syntax, poor documentation, and can crash for no specific reason.

Some of these problems have been addressed in later versions of VB (specifically VB.NET), although in doing so, backwards compatibility with earlier versions of Visual Basic has had to be sacrificed, removing much of its friendliness to beginners. The language continues to receive hefty and continual criticism, although this is balanced by hefty and continual use.

Older Versions of Visual Basic

Visual Basic 1.0 was released for DOS. The language itself was quite sparse, and the interface was barely graphical, using extended ASCII characters to simulate the appearance of a GUI. Visual Basic 2.0 through 3.0 were designed to be run within Microsoft Windows. They were 16-bit applications, and the programs produced by them were also 16-bit applications, ideally run under Windows 3.x. Visual Basic 4.0 was available as a 16-bit or a 32-bit version. The 32-bit version was more powerful, and ran on Windows 95. By version 5.0, Microsoft was releasing Visual Basic exclusively for 32-bit versions of Windows. Programmers who preferred to write 16-bit programs were pleased to find that Visual Basic 5.0 was able to import programs written in Visual Basic 4.0, and it was not difficult to convert Visual Basic 5.0 programs to be compatible with Visual Basic 4.0.

Visual Basic and HyperCard

It is interesting to compare Visual Basic with HyperCard, a programming tool developed by Bill Atkinson, Dan Winkler, and their associates at Apple Computer, Inc and released in 1987. Both HyperCard and VB initially present the user with a "drawing" environment in which UI objects can be dragged, sized, captioned, and have a set of properties edited. Both connect a set of events to fragments of code. And in both cases, the code is written in a programming language that is intended to cater to the novice and be easy to use. This is not to suggest that VB is a clone or copy of HyperCard. The relationship is more like that of C and Pascal to ALGOL: one can see certain resemblances.

Whereas it is said that VB's syntax "tries to resemble the English language," HyperCard's programming language, HyperTalk, like COBOL before it (and AppleScript after it), really does consist of syntactically valid English sentences. (Whether this actually makes it any easier to read, write, understand, or maintain than BASIC is questionable).

The biggest difference, and the reason why VB was a breakthrough in a sense that HyperCard never was, is that VB produced applications that were virtually indistinguishable in look, feel, and general characteristics from Windows applications produced with traditional development tools. That is, it produced "real" Windows applications. HyperCard produced HyperCard stacks, not true Macintosh applications. HyperCard spawned a limited cottage industry of commercial "stackware." And the fully commercial adventure game MYST was based on an elaborated version of HyperCard. Nevertheless, HyperCard "stacks" were always second-class citizens.

HyperCard made a big impression when it was released in 1987, but for various reasons Apple did not follow it up vigorously or develop it much beyond what it was in 1987, and eventually essentially abandoned it. Other vendors had limited success with HyperCard-like products, but at this writing HyperCard is only of historical interest.

See also