Microsoft's programming language based on BASIC and COM
This article is about the Visual Basic language that shipped with Microsoft Visual Studio pre-.NET. For the current Visual Basic language, based on .NET, see Visual Basic (.NET).
VB was first released in 1991. The final release was version 6 (VB6) in 1998. On April 8, 2008, Microsoft stopped supporting the VB6 IDE, relegating it to legacy. The Microsoft VB team still maintains compatibility for VB6 applications through its "It Just Works" program on supported Windows operating systems.[3]
Microsoft significantly changed VB for the .NET technology and rebranded it Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), and then later rebranded it back to Visual Basic. Therefore, Visual Basic can refer to a classic version, a .NET version or both. This article is about the versions before .NET.
Just as BASIC was originally intended to be easy to learn, Microsoft intended the same for VB.[4][5]
Development of a VB application is exclusively supported via the VB integrated development environment (IDE) – an application in the Visual Studio suite of tools of that era. Unlike modern versions of Visual Studio that support many languages including VB (.NET), the VB IDE supports just VB.
In 2014, some software developers still preferred Visual Basic 6.0 over its successor, Visual Basic .NET.[6] Visual Basic 6.0 was selected as the most dreaded programming language by respondents of Stack Overflow's annual developer survey in 2016, 2017, and 2018.[7][8][9]
Overview
As was the intention of older BASIC variants, VB was intended to have a low learning curve. Further, the IDE was intended to promote productivity; even for complex GUI applications. Programming involves visually arranging components or controls on a form, specifying attributes and actions for those components, and writing code that directs behavior. Since components have default attributes and actions, a programmer can develop a simple program without writing much code.
Programs built with earlier versions suffered performance problems, but faster computers and native code compilation made this less of an issue.
Since a VB program is compiled as a native code executable instead of interpreted as old BASIC variants, it runs relatively fast and requires relatively little storage space. But, from version 5 on, it requires relatively large library files to be loaded at runtime; about 1MB. Core runtime libraries are included by default in Windows 2000 and later, but extended runtime components require extra installation consideration. Earlier versions of Microsoft Windows (95/98/NT), require the runtime libraries to be distributed with the executable.
An empty form in Visual Basic 6
Forms are created using drag-and-drop techniques. A tool 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.
Controls provide the graphical functionality of a GUI application, and programmers attach code to event handlers to perform actions. For example, a drop-down control displays a list of items. When the user selects an item, an event handler is automatically called that executes the code that the programmer attached to the handler.
For a DLL, the VB code generally provides no user interface, and instead provides COM objects to other programs. This allows for capabilities such as server-side processing or an add-in module.
Via the COM technology, unused memory is recovered for reuse using reference counting; recovering when the count reaches zero. VB reduces the count when a variable goes out of scope or when assigned to Nothing. This design prevents memory leaks that plague some, older languages such as C & C++. It differs significantly from the more modern approach of garbage collection.
VB provides a large library of utility objects, and it provides basic support for object-oriented programming.
Unlike many other programming languages, VB code is not case-sensitive– though the IDE transforms keywords into a standard case and variable names to match the case used elsewhere in the project. Of note, string comparison is case sensitive by default.
The VB compiler is shared with other Visual Studio suite languages, C and C++. Nevertheless, by default the restrictions in the IDE do not allow creation of some targets (Windows model DLLs) and threading models, but over the years, developers have bypassed these restrictions.
Features
A function using the If, Then, Else and Dim statements
Visual Basic has notable features and characteristics that are in some cases different than other BASIC variants or from other common languages:
Allows use of the Windows API via an external function declaration technology
Supports sharing and reuse via the COM component technology. A programmer can create an application using components provided by VB, developed internally or from third parties. Over time the development community produced and shared many components.[6][10][11][12][13]
Unlike older BASIC variants, instead of requiring line numbers to support branching, code is grouped into named blocks delimited by Sub...End Sub or Function...End Function. VB retains line number support[14]
Code statements have no terminating character other than a line ending (carriage return/line feed), and versions since 3 allow for multi-line statements for concatenation of strings or explicitly using the underscore character (_) at the end of a line[15][16]
A code comment is denoted by a single apostrophe (') character, like: ' This is a comment
Looping statement blocks begin and end with keywords: Do...Loop, While...End While, For...Next[17]
Chained variable assignment is not allowed; for example A = B = C does not result in the values of A, B and C being equal. The Boolean result of "is B equal to C?" is stored in A
Like other BASIC variants, but unlike many other languages that use 1, Boolean True has numeric value −1. VB stores a Boolean as a two's complement signed integer with all ones in binary for true and zero for false. This is apparent when performing a (bitwise) Not operation on the two's complement value 0, which returns the two's complement value −1, in other words True = Not False. This inherent functionality becomes especially useful when performing logical operations on the individual bits of an integer such as And, Or, Xor and Not.[18] This definition of True is also consistent with BASIC since the early 1970s Microsoft BASIC implementation and is also related to the characteristics of CPU instructions at the time.
Logical and bitwise operators are unified. This is unlike some C-derived languages (such as Perl), which have separate logical and bitwise operators. This is a traditional feature of BASIC.
Unlike for many languages which use zero for the lower bound of an array, VB allows the lower bound to be any value – like in Pascal and Fortran. The Option Base statement can be used to set the default lower bound, but some claim that its use leads to confusion when reading code and is best avoided by always explicitly specifying the lower bound. This uncommon language trait does exist in Visual Basic .NET but not in VBScript.
OPTION BASE was introduced by ANSI, with the standard for ANSI Minimal BASIC in the late 1970s.
Banker's rounding as the default behavior when converting real numbers to integers with the Round function.[19]? Round(2.5, 0) gives 2, ? Round(3.5, 0) gives 4.
An integer type value is automatically promoted to a floating point type in expressions that involve the normal division operator (/) so that division of one integer by another produces a result that may seem more intuitive from a mathematical perspective. VB provides an integer divide operator (\) that does truncate.
By default, if a variable has not been declared or if no type declaration character is specified, it acts like a variant. However this can be changed with Deftype statements such as DefInt, DefBool, DefVar, DefObj, DefStr. There are 12 Deftype statements in total offered by Visual Basic 6.0. The default type may be overridden for a specific declaration by using a special suffix character on the variable name (# for Double, ! for Single, & for Long, % for Integer, $ for String, and @ for Currency) or using the key phrase As (type). VB can be setup to require variable declarations via Option Explicit.
History
Alan Cooper created the drag-and-drop design for the user interface of Visual Basic.
BYTE reported in 1989 that, based on its experience with Macintosh software development, Microsoft "wants to provide a development environment that mimics the delivery environment". BASIC's string handling was preferable to C, the company's Greg Lobdell said, when developing the mostly transaction-processing applications Microsoft expected object-oriented programming tools to create.[20] Visual Basic 1.0 was introduced in 1991. The drag and drop design for creating the user interface is derived from a prototype form generator developed by Alan Cooper and his company called Tripod.[21][22][23] Microsoft contracted with Cooper and his associates to develop Tripod into a programmable form system for Windows 3.0, under the code name Ruby (no relation to the later Ruby programming language). Tripod did not include a programming language at all. Microsoft decided to combine Ruby with the Basic language to create Visual Basic. The Ruby interface generator provided the "visual" part of Visual Basic, and this was combined with the "EB" Embedded BASIC engine designed for Microsoft's abandoned "Omega" database system. Ruby also provided the ability to load dynamic link libraries containing additional controls (then called "gizmos"), which later became the VBX interface.[24]
Timeline
Visual Basic for MS-DOSVB DOS icon
Project 'basic Thunder' was initiated in 1990.[25] Thunder persisted through to the last release of Visual Basic in the name of the primary internal function, "ThunderRTMain".
Visual Basic 1.0 (May 1991) was released for Windows at the Comdex/Windows World trade show in Atlanta, Georgia.
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 the next version of Microsoft's DOS-based BASIC compilers, QuickBASIC and BASIC Professional Development System. The interface used a text-based user interface, 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 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 has three editions; Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. It also introduced the ability to write non-GUI classes in Visual Basic. With VB4 the language was separated from the GUI library, and made available as VBA, in which form it was embedded with the Office 95 suite. To ease migration of Office macros and scripts, features from WordBasic, Excel Basic and Access Basic were incorporated into the language. Incompatibilities between different releases of VB4 caused installation and operation problems. While previous versions of Visual Basic had used VBX controls, Visual Basic now used OLE controls (with files names ending in .OCX) instead. These were later to be named ActiveX controls.
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 to 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. A free, downloadable Control Creation Edition was also released for creation of ActiveX controls. It was also used as an introductory form of Visual Basic: a regular .exe project could be created and run in the IDE, but not compiled.
Visual Basic 6.0 (Mid-1998) improved in a number of areas[26] including the ability to create web-based applications.
Mainstream Support for Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 ended on March 31, 2005, and Extended support ended in March 2008.[27] However, primary components of the Visual Basic 6 development environment run in all 32-bit versions of Windows up to and including Windows 11.[28]
Derivative technologies
Microsoft developed many derivatives of VB (classic), including:
Visual Basic .NET is Microsoft's successor to Visual Basic 6.0, and part of Microsoft's .NET ecosystem (which over time has sometimes been called framework and core). It is not backwards compatible with Visual Basic 6.0. An automated conversion tool exists, but fully automated conversion for most projects is not possible.[29]
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)[30] is a scripting language embedded in many Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Office, and third-party products like SolidWorks, AutoCAD, WordPerfect Office 2002, ArcGIS, Sage 300 ERP, and Business Objects Desktop Intelligence. There are small inconsistencies in the way VBA is implemented in different applications, but it is largely the same language as Visual Basic 6.0 and uses the same runtime library. Visual Basic development ended with 6.0, but in 2010 Microsoft introduced VBA 7 to provide extended features and add 64-bit support.[31]
VBScript is the default language for Active Server Pages. It can be used in Windows scripting and client-side web page scripting. It resembles VB in syntax, but is a separate language—executed by vbscript.dll instead of the VB runtime. ASP and VBScript should not be confused with ASP.NET, which uses the .NET Framework for compiled web pages.
Gambas is a Visual Basic inspired free software programming language for the Linux operating system. It is not a clone of Visual Basic, but it does have the ability to convert Visual Basic programs to Gambas.
Versions before 5 compiled the code to P-Code– which is interpreted at runtime. The benefits of P-Code include portability and smaller binary file sizes, but it usually slows execution, since an interpreter adds a layer to the execution environment. VB applications require the Microsoft VB runtime MSVBVM##.DLL, where ## is a version number, either 50 or 60. MSVBVM60.dll comes standard with Windows in all editions from Windows 98 to Windows 11 although some editions of Windows 7 do not include it. For Windows 95 however the application installation process requires the DLL needed by the program. VB 5 and 6 can compile code to either native or P-Code but the runtime is still required for built-in functions and forms management.
dependency on complex and fragile COM registry entries[34]
Legacy development and support
All versions of the Visual Basic IDE, from 1.0 to 6.0, are no longer supported by Microsoft. The associated runtime environments are also unsupported, except for the Visual Basic 6 core runtime environment, which Microsoft officially supports for the lifetime of Windows 10[35] and Windows 11.[36] Third party components that shipped with Visual Studio 6.0 are not included in this support statement. Some legacy Visual Basic components may still work on newer platforms, despite being unsupported by Microsoft and other vendors. Documentation for Visual Basic 6.0, its application programming interface and tools is best covered in the last MSDN release before Visual Studio.NET 2002. Later releases of MSDN focused on .NET development and had significant parts of the Visual Basic 6.0 programming documentation removed as the language evolved, and support for older code ended. Although vendor support for Visual Basic 6 has ended, and the product has never been supported on the latest versions of Windows, key parts of the environment still work on newer platforms. It is possible to get a subset of the development environment working on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows 11.[37] Owing to its persistent remaining popularity,[38] third-party attempts to further support it, such as Rubberduck, exist.[39]
Example code
The following code snippet displays a message box saying "Hello, World!" as the window loads:
PrivateSubForm_Load()' Execute a simple message box that says "Hello, World!"MsgBox"Hello, World!"EndSub
This snippet makes a counter that moves up 1 every second (a label and a timer control need to be added to the form for this to work) until the form is closed or an integer overflow occurs:
OptionExplicitDimCountAsIntegerPrivateSubForm_Load()Count=0Timer1.Interval=1000' units of millisecondsEndSubPrivateSubTimer1_Timer()Count=Count+1Label1.Caption=CountEndSub
Microsoft Access is a database management system (DBMS) from Microsoft that combines the relational Access Database Engine (ACE) with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, included in the Professional and higher editions or sold separately.
VBScript is a deprecated programming language for scripting on Microsoft Windows using Component Object Model (COM) based on classic Visual Basic and Active Scripting.
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6.0 built into most desktop Microsoft Office applications. Although based on pre-.NET Visual Basic, which is no longer supported or updated by Microsoft, the VBA implementation in Office continues to be updated to support new Office features. VBA is used for professional and end-user development due to its perceived ease-of-use, Office's vast installed userbase, and extensive legacy in business.
The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is the foundational application programming interface (API) that allows a computer program to access the features of the Microsoft Windows operating system in which the program is running. Programs access API functionality via dynamic-link library (DLL) technology.
Visual Basic (VB), originally called Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), is a multi-paradigm, object-oriented programming language, implemented on .NET, Mono, and the .NET Framework. Microsoft launched VB.NET in 2002 as the successor to its original Visual Basic language, the last version of which was Visual Basic 6.0. Although the ".NET" portion of the name was dropped in 2005, this article uses "Visual Basic [.NET]" to refer to all Visual Basic languages released since 2002, in order to distinguish between them and the classic Visual Basic. Along with C# and F#, it is one of the three main languages targeting the .NET ecosystem. Microsoft updated its VB language strategy on 6 February 2023, stating that VB is a stable language now and Microsoft will keep maintaining it.
The Microsoft Windows Script Host (WSH) is an automation technology for Microsoft Windows operating systems that provides scripting abilities comparable to batch files, but with a wider range of supported features. This tool was first provided on Windows 95 after Build 950a on the installation discs as an optional installation configurable and installable by means of the Control Panel, and then a standard component of Windows 98 and subsequent and Windows NT 4.0 Build 1381 and by means of Service Pack 4. The WSH is also a means of automation for Internet Explorer via the installed WSH engines from IE Version 3.0 onwards; at this time VBScript became means of automation for Microsoft Outlook 97. The WSH is also an optional install provided with a VBScript and JScript engine for Windows CE 3.0 and following and some third-party engines including Rexx and other forms of Basic are also available.
Delphi is a general-purpose programming language and a software product that uses the Delphi dialect of the Object Pascal programming language and provides an integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development of desktop, mobile, web, and console software, currently developed and maintained by Embarcadero Technologies.
GFA BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language, by Frank Ostrowski. The name is derived from the company, which distributed the software. In the mid-1980s to the 1990s it enjoyed popularity as an advanced BASIC dialect, but has been mostly superseded by several other programming languages. Official support ended in the early 2000s.
Managed Extensions for C++ or Managed C++ is a deprecated set of language extensions for C++, including grammatical and syntactic extensions, keywords and attributes, to bring the C++ syntax and language to the .NET Framework. These extensions were created by Microsoft to allow C++ code to be targeted to the Common Language Runtime (CLR) in the form of managed code, as well as continue to interoperate with native code.
The Access Database Engine is a database engine on which several Microsoft products have been built. The first version of Jet was developed in 1992, consisting of three modules which could be used to manipulate a database.
Active Scripting is the technology used in Windows to implement component-based scripting support. It is based on OLE Automation and allows installation of additional scripting engines in the form of COM modules.
The Speech Application Programming Interface or SAPI is an API developed by Microsoft to allow the use of speech recognition and speech synthesis within Windows applications. To date, a number of versions of the API have been released, which have shipped either as part of a Speech SDK or as part of the Windows OS itself. Applications that use SAPI include Microsoft Office, Microsoft Agent and Microsoft Speech Server.
C# and Visual Basic (.NET) are the two main programming languages used to program on the .NET framework.
The Microsoft Windows operating system supports a form of shared libraries known as "dynamic-link libraries", which are code libraries that can be used by multiple processes while only one copy is loaded into memory. This article provides an overview of the core libraries that are included with every modern Windows installation, on top of which most Windows applications are built.
Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is a set of development tools available in the form of a Visual Studio add-in and a runtime that allows Microsoft Office 2003 and later versions of Office applications to host the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR) to expose their functionality via .NET.
Component Object Model (COM) is a binary-interface technology for software components from Microsoft that enables using objects in a language-neutral way between different programming languages, programming contexts, processes and machines.
Windows Runtime (WinRT) is a platform-agnostic component and application architecture first introduced in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 in 2012. It is implemented in C++ and officially supports development in C++, Rust/WinRT, Python/WinRT, JavaScript-TypeScript, and the managed code languages C# and Visual Basic (.NET) (VB.NET).
Visual Basic .NET was released by Microsoft in 2002 as a successor to the original Visual Basic computer programming language. It was implemented on the .NET Framework 1.0. The main new feature was managed code. Programmers familiar only with Visual Basic would probably have encountered difficulties working with the new version or adapting existing programs for it.
ASP.NET Web Forms is a web application framework and one of several programming models supported by the Microsoft ASP.NET technology. Web Forms applications can be written in any programming language which supports the Common Language Runtime, such as C# or Visual Basic. The main building blocks of Web Forms pages are server controls, which are reusable components responsible for rendering HTML markup and responding to events. A technique called view state is used to persist the state of server controls between normally stateless HTTP requests.
↑ Root, Randal; Romero Sweeney, Mary (2006). A tester's guide to .NET programming. Apress. p.3. ISBN978-1-59059-600-5. You can choose a language based on how easy it is to learn. For beginners, Visual Basic is a good choice. [~snip] A big advantage of Visual Basic is that it is a popular language since it is easy to learn.
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