What is Visual Basic?

Visual Basic is a "visual programming" environment for developing Windows (also Web now) applications. Visual Basic makes it possible to develop complicated applications very quickly. The programmer designs windows graphically, drags program elements from the Visual Basic Toolbox and writes basic code for each element. Visual Basic is "event-driven" which means that procedures are called automatically when the end user chooses menu items, clicks the mouse, moves objects on the screen, etc.

History of Visual Basic

Microsoft first released Visual Basic in 1987. It was the first visual development tool from Microsoft, and it was to compete with C, C++, Pascal and other well-known programming languages. From the start, Visual Basic wasn't a hit. It wasn't until release 2.0 that people really discovered the potential of the language, and with release 3.0 it had become the fastest-growing programming language on the market.

Below is the order and the approximate year in which a new version of Visual Basic was released:

• 1993, VB3 Debut
• 1991, VB1 Debuts
• 1992, VB2 Debuts
• 1996, VB4 Debuts
• 1997, VB5 Debuts
• 1998, VB6 Debuts
• 2001, VB. NET Debuts