Visual Basic... A name everybody knows for a rich, easy and GUI based programming language, making each & every task easier and improves programmer's productivity. VB has won the best RAD ( Rapid Application Development ) Tool award for three times and still keeping itself at top.
Microsoft first started Visual Basic in early 1990s and the project name was "Thunder". After the launch of VB 5.0, it crosses all the boundaries and won the best RAD Tool award by beating PowerBuilder in 1998. VB 5.0 came out with some great enhancements but definitely this time VB.NET has come with revolutionary changes to make it suitable for next generation of application development.
Many developers today talk about new generation programming languages and don't count VB 6.0 as a powerful tool for developing good programs, but i would like to present the surprising data about VB developers given by Bill Gates(The founder and chief software architect of Microsoft Corp.)
"Since Visual Basic's inception, its community has grown to more than 3 million professional developers worldwide. In fact, about half the world's developers now use Visual Basic. The increasing power and richness of the PC provided the backbone for this amazing growth."
Certainly this seems to be an amazing thing to talk about these details in the world of Internet Programming and when we know that Java has already taken place of most popular Internet programming language, but this is hard truth. The only feature lacking in VB was its Internet capabilities and when we are moving towards the third generation of the Internet, it becomes important to have strong Internet Programming capabilities for any programming language. The industry is focusing on critical distributed computing with web services capabilities. At this moment VB.NET is definitely a powerful tool to provide all these solutions in integrated environment of .NET technology. Let us discuss the major problems with VB 6.0, which has been creating troubles for VB developers for a long time.
Problems with VB 6.0
- No capabilities for multithreading.
- Lack of implementation inheritance and other object oriented features.
- Poor error handling capabilities.
- Poor integration with other languages such as C++.
- No effective user interface for Internet based applications.
In VB.NET all these shortcomings have been eliminated. we will discuss how VB.NET implements all these features in our subsequent articles one by one. In fact VB gets the most extensive changes of any existing language in the Visual Studio suite. Let us talk about the major features VB.NET has developed.
Some new features of VB.NET
- Full support for object oriented programming.
- Structured error handling capabilities.
- Access to .NET Framework.
- Powerful unified Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
- Inherent support for XML & Web Services.
- Better windows applications with Windows Forms.
- New Console capabilities of VB.NET.
- New Web capabilities with Web Forms.
- Immense power of tools & controls (including Server Controls).
- Interoperatibility with other .NET complined languages.
- Better database programming approach with ADO.NET.
... and many more. The list is very long. Now we have to figure out that how important role VB will play in future? The answer is there in the words of Bill Gates once again -
"The next 10 years will be an amazing time for software developers. The advancements in the way we develop, deploy, and use applications will be as profound as the architectural shift from DOS- to Windows-based programming. Visual Basic.NET will provide the foundation for building the solutions that enable a new age of truly distributed computing on the Internet.
Microsoft sees the Visual Basic community as a core part of this vision. If you're new to this community, I welcome you to what promises to be an incredibly exciting era. If you're a seasoned Visual Basic developer, I thank you for continuing to make it the world's most popular development tool. I'm confident that Visual Basic.NET will give you the power to write cutting-edge software for tomorrow's Internet."