Submitted by: Cristine M. Sinnung IV – Garcia

Introduction

Visual Basic is a and development environment created by . It is an extension of the BASIC programming language that combines BASIC functions and commands with visual controls. Visual Basic provides a GUI that allows the developer to drag and drop objects into the program as well as manually write program code.

Visual Basic, also referred to as "VB," is designed to make software development easy and efficient, while still being powerful enough to create advanced programs. For example, the Visual Basic language is designed to be "human readable," which means the source code can be understood without requiring lots of comments. The Visual Basic program also includes features like "IntelliSense" and "Code Snippets," which automatically generate code for visual objects added by the programmer. Another feature, called "AutoCorrect," can the code while the program is running.

Programs created with Visual Basic can be designed to run on Windows, on the Web, within Office applications, or on mobile devices. Visual Studio, the most comprehensive VB development environment, or IDE, can be used to create programs for all these mediums. Visual Studio . provides development tools to create programs based on the .NET framework, such as ASP.NET applications, which are often deployed on the Web. Finally, Visual Basic is available as a streamlined application that is used primarily by beginning developers and for educational purposes.

Origin

Dartmouth College, of Dartmouth NH, USA, made a commitment in 1963 to make all its computers easily available to students. To this end, they developed the first fully functional sharing system, running on a General Electric mainframe computer. At the same time, mathematics professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz developed the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) language as an instructional tool for training novice programmers in an interactive environment. Kemeny's distinguished career included service as an assistant to both John von Neumann and Albert Einstein, and chairing the commission that investigated the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident.

Among the design goals of BASIC were • to be easy to learn, yet still powerful enough to be useful for most general purpose programming; • to provide direct user-computer interaction; • to provide clear and friendly error messages; • to give fast response for small programs; • to use minimal amounts of computer resources (such as memory); • require no hardware knowledge, and shield the user from knowledge.

These features of BASIC made it easy and cheap to implement, and thus it quickly became the first (and sometimes the only) high level language made available on new mini- and . BASIC also rapidly became available on newer time-sharing mainframe and super-computers. During the heyday of business , much application programming was done in BASIC. In later years, Kemeny and Kurtz devoted considerable energy to the promotion of structured BASIC. History

Alan Cooper is considered the father of Visual Basic. In 1987, the then Director of Applications Software for Coactive Computing Corporation wrote a program called Ruby that delivered visual programming to the average programmer/user. The increasing popularity and sophistication of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) led Microsoft to introduce Visual Basic (not spelled with capitals) in 1991. Tom Button, Group Product Manager for Applications Programmability at Microsoft, headed the team that produced QuickBASIC and QBASIC. This same group developed Visual Basic by combining Ruby with QuickBASIC.

On June 15 th 2001, a page on Microsoft's Web site entitled “Visual Basic 10th Birthday” included the following paragraph, entitled “Thunder”.

Initially, Visual Basic 1.0 was intended to be a very tactical product. Microsoft had several initiatives in development leading up to Visual Basic 1.0, all of which were intended to develop into long-term, strategic, graphical, object oriented programming tools. As is typical with version 1.0 products, however, the Visual Basic 1.0 product team was forced to cut features from its long list of ideas in order to actually deliver the product to market. As a result, the first Visual Basic offering included little than the Embedded Basic technology that had originally shipped in Microsoft QuickBasic 4.0 (Microsoft's threaded p-code and incremental ) and a simple shell design tool originally licensed for but never used in Windows 3.0. Approximately 12 months after development on version 1.0 began; Microsoft released this “placeholder” development tool, code-named “Thunder”. The Visual Basic (VB) system is a fourth generation programming system which produces much of the code itself as the programmer designs the interface for his or her application. Microsoft surveys in the late 1990's showed that roughly two thirds of all business applications programming on PCs was being done in Visual Basic.

At one time Visual Basic could produce code for both DOS and Windows applications. Today, however, Microsoft considers DOS to be obsolete and promotes the Windows environment exclusively. QBASIC continued to ship on the Windows -ROM up to (at least) version 98SE and so, at the time of writing, may still be available or usable.

When Visual Basic 1.0 was released, Bill Gates, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, described it as 'awesome'. Steve Gibson in Infoworld said Visual Basic is a 'stunning new miracle' and would 'dramatically change the way people feel about and use [Microsoft] Windows.' Stewart Alsop was quoted in the New York Times as saying Visual Basic is 'the perfect programming environment for the 1990's'.

VB's success may be largely due to the simplification that it brought to Windows application programming. Prior to Visual Basic, Windows applications programming required mastery of huge libraries and hundreds of lines of code to create even simple screen elements. VB eliminates the need to write code for GUI input/output, thus reducing by orders of magnitude the length of code and time to develop an application. Charles Petzold, author of many of the standard reference works on Windows programming in , was quoted in the New York Times as saying “For those of us who make our living explaining the complexities of Windows programming to programmers, Visual Basic poses a real threat to our livelihood”.

However, successful programming in this system requires an understanding of asynchronous event-driven multi-programming, networked, client-server and database architectures, and therefore it was suggested that QBASIC and other third generation languages still better met the design goals that Kurtz and Kemeny originally set, i.e. to be easy to learn and rapidly useful for a wide range of simple programming problems. Significant Language Features

Visual Basic is not only a programming language, but also a complete graphical development environment. This environment allows users with little programming experience to quickly develop useful applications which have the ability to use OLE ( Object Linking and Embedding ) objects, such as an Excel spreadsheet. 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 than many SQL versions are capable of.

Visual Basic's main selling point is the ease with which it allows the user to create nice looking, graphical programs with little coding by the programmer, unlike many other languages that may take hundreds 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. In order to understand how this happens it is necessary to understand the major concepts, objects and tools used by Visual Basic. The main object in Visual Basic is called a form. When you open a new project, you will with a clear form that looks similar to this :

This form will eventually be incorporated into your program as a window. To this form you add controls. Controls are things like text boxes, check boxes and command buttons. Controls are added to your form by choosing them from the Visual Basic "tool box" with the mouse and inserting them in the form. Yours may look different, but the Visual Basic Tool Box looks like this : Once forms/controls are created, you can change the properties ( appearance, structure etc. ) related to those objects in that particular objects properties window. From this window, you choose the property you want to change from the list and change its corresponding setting. Here is an example of a properties window :

Finally, you can add events to your controls. Events are responses to actions performed on controls. For example, in the "Hello world" program sample on this page, when you click on the command button on our form the event that is triggered is the output of the message "Hello world" to the screen. Code must be written to create an event. You can do this in Visual Basic's code window. Yours will look similar to this ( except of course, the body of the sub-procedure where the actions are specified) :

Once the code box is open, you select the object to create an event for and the triggering action ( such as a certain mouse action ) from the drop down menus in the code box. You can open a code box for a particular form by choosing it from the project window and selecting the View Code button. The project window contains a list of objects associated with that project. Below is an example of a project window :

Once all your objects are created, you can combine them to form a single executable program that can be run outside of the Visual Basic environment, in Microsoft Windows. Timeline of Visual Basic (VB1 to VB6) Project 'Thunder' was initiated Visual Basic 1.0 (May 1991) was released for Windows at the Comdex/Windows World trade show in Atlanta, Georgia.

Visual Basic for MS-DOS, Visual Basic 1.0 for DOS was released in September 1992. The language itself was not quite compatible with Visual Basic for Windows, as it was actually the next version of Microsoft's DOS- based BASIC , QuickBASIC and BASIC Professional Development System. The interface was textual, using extended ASCII characters to simulate the appearance of a GUI.

Visual Basic 2.0 was released in November 1992. The programming environment was easier to use, and its speed was improved. Notably, forms became instantiable objects, thus laying the foundational concepts of class modules as were later offered in VB4.

Visual Basic 3.0 was released in the summer of 1993 and came in Standard and Professional versions. VB3 included version 1.1 of the Microsoft Jet Database Engine that could read and write Jet (or Access) 1.x databases.

Visual Basic 4.0 (August 1995) was the first version that could create 32-bit as well as 16-bit Windows programs. It also introduced the ability to write non-GUI classes in Visual Basic.

With version 5.0 (February 1997), Microsoft released Visual Basic exclusively for 32-bit versions of Windows. Programmers who preferred to write 16-bit programs were able to import programs written in Visual Basic 4.0 to Visual Basic 5.0, and Visual Basic 5.0 programs can easily be converted with Visual Basic 4.0. Visual Basic 5.0 also introduced the ability to create custom user controls, as well as the ability to compile to native Windows executable code, speeding up calculation-intensive code execution.

Visual Basic 6.0 (Mid 1998) improved in a number of areas, including the ability to create web-based applications. VB6 is currently scheduled to enter Microsoft's "non-supported phase" starting March 2008. Mainstream Support for Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 ended on March 31, 2005. Extended support will end in March 2008. In response, the Visual Basic user community expressed its grave concern and lobbied users to sign a petition to keep the product alive.

Microsoft has so far refused to change their position on the matter. Ironically, around this time, it was exposed that Microsoft's new anti-spyware offering, Microsoft AntiSpyware (part of the GIANT Company Software purchase), was coded in Visual Basic 6.0.[4] Windows Defender Beta 2 was rewritten as C++/CLI code, as mentioned in Paul Thurrott's review of this product. 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:

• Accounting

• Business

• Commerce

• Consulting

• Education

• Law

• Marketing and Sales

• Medicine

• Research

• 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.

References:

Introduction: http://www.techterms.com/definition/visualbasic Origin and History: http://dc37.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/compsci/gmack/info/VBHistory.htm Timeline and Areas of use: http://it.toolbox.com/wiki/index.php/Visual_Basic