MS Visual Basic

Visual Basic (VB) is an event driven programming language and associated development environment from Microsoft. VB has been replaced by Visual Basic .NET. more...

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The older version of VB was derived heavily from BASIC and enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using DAO, RDO, or ADO, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects.

A programmer can put together an application using the components provided with Visual Basic itself. Programs written in Visual Basic can also use the Windows API, but doing so requires external function declarations.

In business programming, Visual Basic has one of the largest user bases. According to some sources, as of 2003, 52% of software developers used Visual Basic, making it the most popular programming language at that time. Another point of view was provided by the research done by Evans Data that found that 43% of Visual Basic developers planned to move to other languages. Visual Basic currently competes with PHP and C++ as the third most popular programming language behind Java and C.

Derivative languages

Microsoft has developed derivatives of Visual Basic for use in scripting. It is derived heavily from BASIC and host applications, and has replaced the original Visual Basic language with a .NET platform version:

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is included in many Microsoft applications (Microsoft Office), and also in several third-party products like WordPerfect Office 2002 and ESRI ArcGIS. There are small inconsistencies in the way VBA is implemented in different applications, but it is largely the same language as VB6.;

Here is an example of the language:;

Function that returns the area of a circle

Another Example to write the words "Hello world" on the form:

VBScript is the default language for Active Server Pages and can be used in Windows scripting and client-side web page scripting. Although it resembles VB in syntax, it is a separate language and it is executed by the Windows Script Host as opposed to the VB runtime. These differences can affect the performance of an ASP web site (namely inefficient string concatenation and absence of short-cut evaluation). ASP and VBScript must not be confused with ASP.NET which uses Visual Basic.Net or any other language that targets the .NET Common Language Runtime.;

Visual Basic .NET is Microsoft's designated successor to Visual Basic 6.0, and is part of Microsoft's .NET platform. The VB.NET programming language is a true object-oriented language that compiles and runs on the .NET Framework. VB.NET is a totally new tool from the ground up, not backwards compatible with VB6. For this reason, it was suggested by Bill Vaughn, and wholeheartedly embraced by the user community, that it ought to have been given an alternative name. Visual Fred (or VFred for short) was the consensus choice. VB.NET ships with a rudimentary utility to convert legacy VB6 code, although the inefficient nature of the resulting code (due to major differences between the two languages) often leads programmers to prefer manual conversion instead. Indeed, automated conversion is seen as a fantasy.;

Read more at Wikipedia.org