Visual Basic

• VBScript is the default language for Active Server Pages and can be used in Windows scripting and client-side web page scripting. Although it resembles VB in syntax, it is a separate language and it is executed by the Windows Scripting Host as opposed to the VB runtime. These differences can affect the performance of an ASP web site (namely inefficient string concatenation and absence of short-cut evaluation).

Language features

Basic was designed to be usable by all programmers, whether novice or expert. Forms are created using drag and drop techniques. A tools palette is used to place controls (e.g., text boxes, buttons, etc.) on the form (window). Controls have attributes and event handlers associated with them. Default values are provided when the control is created, but may be changed by the programmer. Many attribute values can be modified during run time based on user actions or changes in the environment, providing a dynamic application. For example, code can be inserted into the form resize event handler to reposition a control so that it remains centered on the form, expands to fill up the form, etc. By inserting code into the event handler for a keypress in a text box, the program can automatically translate the case of the text being entered, or even prevent certain characters from being inserted.

A Visual Basic application can consist of one or more windows, or a single window that contains child windows, as provided by the operating system. Dialog boxes with less functionality (e.g., no maximize/minimize control) can be used to provide pop-up capabilities. Controls provide the basic functionality of the application, while programmers can insert additional logic within the appropriate event handlers. For example, a drop-down combination box will automatically display its list and allow the user to select any element. An event handler is called when an item is selected, which can then execute additional code created by the programmer to perform some action based on which element was selected.

Alternatively, a Visual Basic component can have no user interface, but be available to other programs, providing objects that implement functionality. This allows for server-side processing or an add-in model.

The language is garbage collected, has a large library of utility objects, and has basic object oriented support. Unlike many other programming languages, Visual Basic is not case sensitive. String comparisons can be performed with case sensitivity, if so desired.

Visual Basic spawned the first commercially viable reusable component market. There are thousands of 3rd party components available today from hundreds of vendors. Visual Basic makes it easy to build, deploy, use, and reuse components, however it is not as easy to use forms created for one application with another, due to the global nature of the language.

Controversy

Visual Basic is a controversial language; many programmers have strong feelings regarding the quality of Visual Basic. It was designed to be a simple language, and many features found in languages like C++ and Java are not found in Visual Basic. In the interest of convenience and rapid development, some features like compile time type-checking and variable declaration can be turned off. This leads to programmers praising Visual Basic for how simple it is to use, but also leads to frustration when programmers realize they need to use a feature that has been removed.

Many critics of Visual Basic explain that the simple nature of Visual Basic is harmful in the long run. First, it is often used to teach programming due to its simplicity, but learning to program in Visual Basic does not introduce the programmer to many fundamental programming techniques and constructs. This often leads to unintelligible code and workarounds. Second, allowing the programmer to turn off many of the checks and warnings that a compiler implements may lead to difficulties in finding bugs. Experienced programmers working in VB tend to leave such checks on.

Much criticism of Visual Basic is simply criticism of BASIC. A famous formulation by Edsger Dijkstra was, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration [1]." (Dijkstra was no less scathing about FORTRAN, PL/1, COBOL and APL.)

But many of the proponents of Visual Basic explain that the simple nature of Visual Basic is its main strength, allowing very rapid application development to experienced Visual Basic coders and a very slight learning curve for programmers coming from other languages. Additionally, Visual Basic applications can easily be integrated with databases, a common requirement.

Visual Basic is also a conglomerate of language features and syntax, with less consistency, but more tolerance, than many modern programming languages. Many language features like GoSub, On Error, and declaring the type of a variable by the last character in the name (i.e. str$) are legacies from Visual Basic's BASIC roots, and are included for backward-compatibility. Other characteristics include variable and subroutine names that are not case sensitive, and an underscore "_" must be used for a statement to span multiple lines. Some Visual Basic programmers perceive these as strengths needed to avoid case-sensitive compiler errors, and line-termination characters some languages require, usually semicolons.

The language continues to attract much praise and criticism, and it continues to cater to a large base of users and developers.

Programming constructs not present in Visual Basic

• Object-oriented programming. Visual Basic has simple support for object-oriented programming but many common object-oriented features (such as inheritance) are not present in versions prior to Visual Basic .NET (2002).
• Threading support not present prior to Visual Basic .NET.
• Exception handling with Try-Catch-Finally prior to Visual Basic .NET. Errors are handled by an "On Error Goto line" statement.
• Built-in support for some bitwise arithmetic such as bit shifting.
• Typecasting. VB instead has explicit conversion functions.
• Equivalents to C-style pointers are very limited.
• Visual Basic is limited to signed integers of 8 to 32 bits (8 to 64 bits in Visual Basic .NET and later), whereas many other languages provides built-in unsigned integers.
• 32-bit and 64-bit Visual Basic is internally limited to UTF-16 strings, although it provides conversion functions to other formats (16-bit Visual Basic is internally limited to ASCII strings).
• Visual Basic doesn't allow constant variables to contain an array. Therefore extra processing is required to emulate this.

Behaviors present in Visual Basic

VB has the following uncommon traits:

• Variable array base. The first element in an array can either be referenced as the 0th or 1st element (controlled by the Option Base statement), leading to possible confusion when reading Visual Basic code. This lower bound is not limited to 0 or 1, because it can also be set by declaration. In this way, both the lower and upper bounds are programmable. In more subscript-limited languages, the lower bound of the array is not variable. This uncommon trait doesn't exist in Visual Basic .NET and VBScript.
• Ability to run the application without performing a full compile or making an executable, allowing for edit-and-continue changes.
• Relatively strong integration with the Windows operating system.
• Banker's rounding as the default behaviour when converting real numbers to integers.
  

  Visual Basic and VB.NET

VB.NET is also a fully-compiled language (as opposed to previous versions which could both compile and interpret the language). Programs require compilation even to be debugged. This resulted in a number of features being removed from Visual Basic, including the quick execution of programs, and the famous edit-and-continue feature (this feature will be restored in Visual Basic .NET 2005). Other significant features from past editions were also removed including control arrays.

Many of the original critics of Visual Basic now praise VB.NET for providing a "complete" language, while a few supporters of Visual Basic claim VB.NET has made the language too complicated and too hard to use for simple application development. Another criticism of VB.NET is the incompatibility and lack of similarity in syntax. VB.NET provides a wizard to help upgrade code, but many features are not converted properly. The wizard produces a list of places in the code where the upgrade is incomplete, but large projects have many thousands of such places requiring lots of programmer time to complete the upgrade. In particular the Variant data type, which was the default data type is no longer supported. Therefore, programs that did not declare all variables and/or those that depended on the Variant data type cannot be converted without significant effort. Programs written in VB.NET are not able to be feasibly converted back to VB6 code at all.

Some believe VB.NET support will diminish, with C# becoming the preferred language for .NET programming. This is despite the fact both compile to the same .NET Common Intermediate Language, with the programming language choice merely a matter of syntax preference.

Other criticisms of Visual Basic

• Not being very portable. It is only available for Microsoft Windows, although a DOS version was marketed at one time. However, much of the code can run in Microsoft Office applications using VBA, including those applications running on Mac OS.
• Being too big. Visual Studio is distributed on several discs, and executables require a 1.4 MB runtime library. However, while it is indeed distributed on several disks, Visual Studio is in essence a suite of applications, including Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual J#, Microsoft WebDev and Microsoft SQL Server, among others. In reality, Visual Basic itself occupies only a large portion of one of the distribution discs.
• Having bugs in the IDE. This is fixed to some extent by a series of service packs from Microsoft.
  

  Evolution of Visual Basic

Timeline

• Visual Basic 1.0 (May 1991) was released for Windows.

• 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 compilers, QuickBASIC and BASIC Professional Development System. The interface was barely graphical, 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.

• Visual Basic 3.0 was released in the summer of 1993 and came in Standard and Professional versions. VB3 included a database engine that could read and write Access databases.

• Visual Basic 4.0 (August 1995) was the first that could create 32-bit as well as 16-bit Windows programs. It also introduced the ability to write 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 pleased to find that Visual Basic 5.0 was able to import programs written in Visual Basic 4.0, and it was not difficult to convert Visual Basic 5.0 programs to be compatible with Visual Basic 4.0. Visual Basic 5.0 also offered the ability to compile to native Windows executable code, eliminating the need for a runtime library.

• Visual Basic 6.0 (Summer 1998) improved in a number of areas, including the ability to create web-based applications. VB6 will enter Microsoft's "non-supported phase" starting March 2008.

• Visual Basic .NET was launched in 2001 along with the .NET Framework. Its language features are much richer than previous versions, although it is more complex, and many older VB programs must be rewritten to work in VB.NET.

• Visual Basic .NET 2003 was launched in 2003 along with the .NET Framework 1.1.

• In 2004 Microsoft released a beta version of Visual Basic 2005 (codename Whidbey).
  

  Visual Basic and HyperCard

Unlike VB, HyperCard's programming language, HyperTalk, like COBOL before it (and AppleScript after it), consists of syntactically valid English sentences, such as "Get the number of card buttons." (Whether this actually makes it any easier to read, write, understand, or maintain than BASIC is arguable.)

The biggest difference, and the reason why VB was a breakthrough in a sense that HyperCard never was, is that VB produced applications that were virtually indistinguishable in look, feel, and general characteristics from Windows applications produced with traditional development tools. That is, it produced "real" Windows applications. HyperCard produced HyperCard stacks, not true Macintosh applications. HyperCard briefly spawned a limited cottage industry of commercial "stackware," rather like the former market in spreadsheet templates, but saw little commercial application (with notable exceptions: the fully commercial adventure game Myst was based on an elaborated version of HyperCard). HyperCard "stacks" were always recognizable as such.

HyperCard made a big impression when it was released in 1987, but for various reasons Apple did not follow it up vigorously or develop it much beyond what it was in 1987. By the year 2000 Apple had effectively abandoned it; it was officially discontinued in April 2004.

External links