The Essence of Visual Basic

Simplicity and ease of use, is what makes Visual Basic the most popular programming language in the World. Introduced as the Rapid Application Development (RAD) Tool, Visual Basic gained much fame because of the innovative features it pioneered:-

The name visual itself is very important, for the first time, people could drag and drop controls onto a design surface and see how a program would look without going through the lengthy edit-compile-test cycles required by other languages.

Stepping Through Code

Stepping through code while debugging – just ask any VB developer if they could do without it.

The introduction of Active X Controls took the idea of code re-usability to a completely new level. VB was also the first popular general-purpose language to offer truly integrated database access. The IDE concept that VB revolutionized has now been incorporated by non Microsoft products too (Delphi, Java).

Intellisense

It speeds up software development by reducing the amount of keyboard input required and allows less reference to external documentation due to embedded function signatures and short descriptions.

Case Insensitivity

Nothing personal against the shift key, but holding it up and down is really annoying. Try typing miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinGfor a change.

True it lacked the pure object oriented power of other languages, but hasn’t it caught up with the new .NET version? As we programmers grow lazier day by day, changes such as these are immensely welcome and with the further advent of hi-tech sidekicks, we will do so even more.

• Share: