What’s Visual Basic?

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Visual Basic is a programming language developed by Microsoft. It has a strong following, although it has largely been replaced by Microsoft’s Visual Basic .NET, which ships as part of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The original language itself lasted from 1991 to 1998, and support continued for the next decade, before finally being phased out.

The core principles of Visual Basic were built on the older BASIC language, which was a mainstay of computer programmers throughout the 1980s. Alan Cooper had developed a drag-and-drop interface in the late 1980s, and Microsoft approached him to ask him and his company, Tripod, to develop the concept into a form-building application. When they delivered this project, known as Ruby at the time, Microsoft decided to pair it with the BASIC programming language, creating the new language.

Over the next seven years, Visual Basic would go through a series of iterations, culminating in version 6.0, a robust programming language. Microsoft eventually dropped language support, although its runtimes are supported by all subsequent Microsoft operating systems. Despite no formal support, Visual Basic has an active community of programmers who act to support each other and to help people who are new to the language.

In 2001, after Visual Basic had been out of development for three years, Microsoft replaced it with a version based on the .NET framework. Despite many positive features, the fact that the new version was not created to be fully backward compatible with previous versions of Visual Basic has caused a number of problems. Eventually, it led to a significant rift in the developer community, as many programmers stuck with the old language, while others switched to the new one.

Many people find Visual Basic to be an ideal programming language for beginners because its graphical features make it more intuitive for some users. Basically, it’s still based on the BASIC language, but it does away with some of the more difficult parts of programming while providing an easier to use interface. It will often be the first programming language a person learns, before moving on to a language like C++. Sometimes, however, a programmer can become comfortable enough with Visual Basic that it remains their primary programming language, even for creating complex programs.

Any type of program can be compiled with Visual Basic and is a robust and versatile environment. The modern .NET language includes many features not found in many contemporary languages, making it ideal for a number of purposes. As of 2005, the language has seen some significant revisions that should have brought it more into line with the more powerful .NET languages. These included adding partial classes, nullable and generic types. As of 2008 and Visual Basic 9.0, the language included anonymous types, XML literals, type inference, and a true if operator.

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