Visual Basic 6.0 - Introduction

Dedicated to all my classmates...

Visual Basic (VB) is a third generation event driven programming language and Integrated Development Environment(IDE) from Microsoft for its COM programming model first released in 1991. VB was originally created to make it easier to write programs for the Windows computer Operating System. VB is designed to be relatively easy to learn and use. It enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user Interface(GUI) applications, access to database using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects.

Scripting languages such as VBA and VBScript are syntactically similar to Visual Basic, but perform differently.  It is a high  level programming language which evolved from the earlier DOS version called BASIC that was invented by Dartmouth College professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. BASIC means Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It is a very easy programming language to learn. The code look a lot  like English Language. Different software companies produced different versions of BASIC, such as Microsoft QBASIC, QUICKBASIC, GWBASIC ,IBM BASICA and so on. However, people prefer to use Microsoft Visual Basic today, as it is a well developed programming language and supporting resources are available everywhere. Now, there are many versions of VB exist in the market, the most popular one and still widely used by many VB programmers is none other than Visual Basic 6. We also have VB.net, VB2005, VB2008 and the latest VB2010. Both Vb2008 and VB2010 are fully object oriented programming (OOP) language.

VB is a Visual and events driven Programming language. These are the main divergence from the old BASIC. In Basic, programming is done in a text – only environment and the program is executed sequentially. In VB, programming is done in a graphical environment. In old BASIC, you have to write program code for each graphical object you wish to display it on screen, including its position and its color. However, in VB, you just  need to drag and drop any graphical object anywhere on the form, and you can change its color any time using the properties window.

On the other hand, because the user may click on a certain object randomly, so each object has to be programmed independently to be able to response to those actions (events). Therefore, a VB program is made up of many subprograms, each has its own program code, and each can be executed independently and at the same time each can be linked together in one way or the other.

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