Visual Basic Still Used

[Narcisa Flierl]

Iwork for a fortune 25 company and we have a few legacy apps there were written in VB6. However all new development (in the Windows world) is strictly .NET. I would suggest learning VB.NET if you're interested in learning VB.

Computing languages don't die easily, and there are always niche markets where those skills are needed. Languages like Smalltalk, Lisp, COBOL, etc. have there loyal followers and clients that need those abilities. There will probably be some need for VB6 for a while yet.

The chief difference between VB6 and the other languages I mentioned is that the newer version of VB (VB.Net) has been declared by Microsoft to replace VB6. That tells me that VB6 will have a shrinking market as newer versions of Windows makes it near impossible to have VB6 apps that look like current modern applications.

My advice is: if you have a current need for VB6, like maintaining a legacy application, by all means learn it. The more useful you are to a company, the longer they'll keep you. If you don't have a current need for VB6 then learn the newer version of the technology. In the Microsoft world, the .NET CLR based languages are the current vision of the future. You'll also have more success finding help for problems you're facing day to day.

I also work an Fortune 25 company with a world-wide presence and many legacy VB6 apps are still widely used through the company. Myself, I am a .NET developer and only learn as much VB6 as I need to fix a production issue or to convert something to .NET (typically C#). So no, don't invest time in learning it unless you must on the job.

Learning any language is worthwhile! VB is easy to understand and M$ has many libraries that are easy to use (i.e. look at connecting to Databases/creating Forms... if you're interested in what real world applications are built on it).

I wouldnt waste my time learning VB6. I worked with it 10 years ago and I'm still thankful everytime I look at my CV that I had the opportunity to start working in C#.NET. VB6 felt like a mickey mouse language.

VB6 applications are probably still used quite a lot but I believe for new development over the years VB6 has been chosen less and less as a primary platform to develop an application with people opting for .NET alternatives.

In terms of learning it, I would only do this is you need to work with old VB6 applications that will not be upgraded to .NET, or if you are upgrading VB6 applications to .NET then by all means learn it but dont waste to much time on it.

I would hazard an educated guess, based on my own experience, that there are many more programmers writing new COBOL programs than new VB6 programs. VB6 is ten years replaced and, as far as I can tell, no longer supported in any way by Microsoft.

There are still products around that are written in it (I have two myself) but Microsoft have meant to have said that Windows 8 will not work with VB6 programs, also Visual Studio 6 (required to build VB6 projects) does not easily run on Vista and Win7.

My advice: learn VBA if you need it, but only learn VB6 if you have a maintenance project that requires it. If you really want to learn BASIC then go for VB.NET. It is difficult to suggest other alternatives (there are lots!) unless we know about what you want to learn and why. Eg. If you wanted to learn about OOP then I think C# or Java would be better.

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.[6]

Microsoft's integrated development environment (IDE) for developing in Visual Basic is Visual Studio. Most Visual Studio editions are commercial; the only exceptions are Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio Community, which are freeware. In addition, the .NET Framework SDK includes a freeware command-line compiler called vbc.exe. Mono also includes a command-line VB.NET compiler.

Visual Basic is often used in conjunction with the Windows Forms GUI library to make desktop apps for Windows. Programming for Windows Forms with Visual Basic involves dragging and dropping controls on a form using a GUI designer and writing corresponding code for each control.

The Windows Forms library is most commonly used to create GUI interfaces in Visual Basic. All visual elements in the Windows Forms class library derive from the Control class. This provides the minimal functionality of a user interface element such as location, size, color, font, text, as well as common events like click and drag/drop. The Control class also has docking support to let a control rearrange its position under its parent.

Forms are typically designed in the Visual Studio IDE. In Visual Studio, 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.

Visual Basic uses statements to specify actions. The most common statement is an expression statement, consisting of an expression to be evaluated, on a single line. As part of that evaluation, functions or subroutines may be called and variables may be assigned new values. To modify the normal sequential execution of statements, Visual Basic provides several control-flow statements identified by reserved keywords. Structured programming is supported by several constructs including two conditional execution constructs (If ... Then ... Else ... End If and Select Case ... Case ... End Select ) and four iterative execution (loop) constructs (Do ... Loop, For ... To, For Each, and While ... End While) . The For ... To statement has separate initialisation and testing sections, both of which must be present. (See examples below.) The For Each statement steps through each value in a list.

This is a module definition. Modules are a division of code, which can contain any kind of object, like constants or variables, functions or methods, or classes, but can not be instantiated as objects like classes and cannot inherit from other modules. Modules serve as containers of code that can be referenced from other parts of a program.[8]

It is common practice for a module and the code file which contains it to have the same name. However, this is not required, as a single code file may contain more than one module or class.

This line performs the actual task of writing the output. Console is a system object, representing a command-line interface (also known as a "console") and granting programmatic access to the operating system's standard streams. The program calls the Console method WriteLine, which causes the string passed to it to be displayed on the console.

Whether Visual Basic .NET should be considered as just another version of Visual Basic or a completely different language is a topic of debate. There are new additions to support new features, such as structured exception handling and short-circuited expressions. Also, two important data-type changes occurred with the move to VB.NET: compared to Visual Basic 6, the Integer data type has been doubled in length from 16 bits to 32 bits, and the Long data type has been doubled in length from 32 bits to 64 bits. This is true for all versions of VB.NET. A 16-bit integer in all versions of VB.NET is now known as a Short. Similarly, the Windows Forms editor is very similar in style and function to the Visual Basic form editor.

The changes have altered many underlying assumptions about the "right" thing to do with respect to performance and maintainability. Some functions and libraries no longer exist; others are available, but not as efficient as the "native" .NET alternatives. Even if they compile, most converted Visual Basic 6 applications will require some level of refactoring to take full advantage of the new language. Documentation is available to cover changes in the syntax, debugging applications, deployment and terminology.[11]

The following simple examples compare VB and VB.NET syntax. They assume that the developer has created a form, placed a button on it and has associated the subroutines demonstrated in each example with the click event handler of the mentioned button. Each example creates a "Hello, World" message box after the button on the form is clicked.

C# and Visual Basic are Microsoft's first languages made to program on the .NET Framework (later adding F# and more; others have also added languages). Though C# and Visual Basic are syntactically different, that is where the differences mostly end. Microsoft developed both of these languages to be part of the same .NET Framework development platform. They are both developed, managed, and supported by the same language development team at Microsoft.[13] They compile to the same intermediate language (IL), which runs against the same .NET Framework runtime libraries.[14] Although there are some differences in the programming constructs, their differences are primarily syntactic and, assuming one avoids the Visual Basic "Compatibility" libraries provided by Microsoft to aid conversion from Visual Basic 6, almost every feature in VB has an equivalent feature in C# and vice versa. Lastly, both languages reference the same Base Classes of the .NET Framework to extend their functionality. As a result, with few exceptions, a program written in either language can be run through a simple syntax converter to translate to the other. There are many open source and commercially available products for this task.

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