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Visual Basic
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Introduction
Microsoft
Visual Basic is an object oriented high-level programming language.
It is the first programming language that uses a
“visual” interface building. That means that you can
just draw the interface you want (for example you can draw a button
just like drawing a square in Paint).
History
Microsoft first released Visual Basic 1.0
in 1991 (Code named "Thunder"). It was the first visual development
tool from Microsoft, and it was to (supposedly) compete with C,
C++, Pascal and any other well known programming languages. When it
came out, Visual Basic wasn't a success. It wasn't until Microsoft
released VB 2.0 in 1993 that people really started to discover the
power of the language, and when Microsoft released VB 3.0 it had
become the fastest growing programming language on the market. The
amount of programmers using Visual Basic is into the millions...and
counting.
By now, Visual Basic has
earned itself the status of a professional programming (read: real
language) language, and has almost freed BASIC of the reputation of
a children's language.
The most important aspect of VB's success are
the third-party add-ons by large companies and individual users
alike. Almost everyone is making VBXs (though a bit outdated),
OCXs, and recently ActiveX controls.
VB compiled programs were
small. Back in VB 1.0 - 3.0 the runtimes were relatively small, but
now Microsoft is making us distribute 700k and now 1.3MB runtime
DLLs!!
Another thing adding to this
thought is VB's pseudo-code. VB executables aren't real
executables, like those of Pascal, C, C++, Delphi, and
PowerBuilder. They contain special codes that only vbrun###.dll and
now msvbvm60.dll can interpret and pass on as real commands. For
this reason, Visual Basic is called an interpreted language. This
is also the reason why Visual Basic programs usually are slow
compared to Pascal ,C, C++, Delphi, and PowerBuilder. What you gain
in size, is usually eaten by loss in speed. But now, with the
release of Visual Basic 6.0 is as fast as ever. It's giving Visual
C++ a run for its money leaving Delphi, Vb4, PowerBuilder, and
other languages in the dust. One reason why it's faster is not
because of it's compiler, but its Forms Engine, which is greatly improved and other areas of VB6
have improved significantly.
Some new features available in VB6
are the ability to create ActiveX controls, ActiveX EXEs, and
ActiveX DLLs. They all let you put them on the web! Visual
Basic 6.0, in my opinion is going to revolutionize the internet. It
gives way to the static html pages we were raving about a year or
so ago.
You can download ActiveX controls. Form here.
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