Basics Of Visual Basic Language

[Florio Bessinger]

VBNet is a simple, modern, object-oriented computer programming language developed by Microsoft to combine the power of .NET Framework and the common language runtime with the productivity benefits that are the hallmark of Visual Basic. This tutorial will teach you basic VB.Net programming and will also take you through various advanced concepts related to VB.Net programming language.

This tutorial has been prepared for the beginners to help them understand basic VB.Net programming. After completing this tutorial, you will find yourself at a moderate level of expertise in VB.Net programming from where you can take yourself to next levels.

VB.Net programming is very much based on BASIC and Visual Basic programming languages, so if you have basic understanding on these programming languages, then it will be a fun for you to learn VB.Net programming language.

Visual Basic (VB) is an event-driven programming language and environment from Microsoft that provides a graphical user interface (GUI) which allows programmers to modify code by simply dragging and dropping objects and defining their behavior and appearance. VB is derived from the BASIC programming language and is considered to be event-driven and object-oriented.

VB is intended to be easy to learn and fast to write code with; as a result, it is sometimes called a rapid application development (RAD) system and is used to prototype an application that will later be written in a more difficult but efficient language.

The last version of VB, Visual Basic 6, was released in 1998, but has since been replaced by VB .NET, Visual Basic for applications (VBA) and Visual Stuido .NET. VBA and Visual Studio are the two frameworks most commonly used today.

VB is a GUI-based development tool that offers a faster RAD than most other programming languages. VB also features syntax that is more straightforward than other languages, a visual environment that is easy to understand and high database connectivity.

Visual Basic was designed to be a complete programming language that contained ordinary features, such as string processing and computation. The visual environment is characterized by a drag-and-drop feature which allows programmers to build a user interface that is easy to use, even for developers with minimum experience.

While these features of VB are advantageous, there are others that can have a negative effect. The VB programming environment requires a large amount of memory, both for the initial installation and to run efficiently afterwards. The graphical features of the programming tool take up a large amount of space and require a significant amount of memory.

Finally, with C languages, programmers can feasibly locate and use the defined values for variable data in a computer program at declaration time. This initialization practice is something that isn't easily done with VB.

The structure of VB is designed to allow programmers to use the environment to write executable files (exe files). Also, using VB, developers can create programs that can be utilized as a front end to databases. VB tools can help programmers develop applications or complete software while still allowing them to modify and revise their work accordingly.

The most popular type of Visual Basic in use today is VBA. VBA is a version of Visual Basic that can be used to program Microsoft Office apps, such as Excel and PowerPoint. However, it can only be used to modify existing apps; VBA cannot be used to create new apps.

Typical users engage VBA to make repeated, everyday tasks less monotonous through the use of macros. Macros automate almost any activity -- such as performing word and data processing or generating custom charts and tables. For example, a typical user might write a macro that allows them to create and fill a spreadsheet with a single click. Computer professionals use VBA and macros in more complicated ways. Programmers will often write macros that can replicate large portions of code or define specific languages.

Businesses and organizations can use VBA to customize Excel for their unique purposes, such as pulling certain statistics or information from a spreadsheet. Businesses and organizations can also use VBA externally, or in non-Microsoft applications, by applying a technology called a component object model (COM) interface that enables commands to communicate across computer boundaries. This allows VBA to be used on an enterprise-specific application.

However, VB becomes extremely beneficial when used with Microsoft's COM interface. The COM components can be written in various languages and then integrated using VB. Additionally, VB provides not only a programming language, but an integrated development environment (IDE) that has been written and optimized to best support RAD. This allows programmers to easily build GUIs and connect them to functions within the application.

Overall, VB enables the rapid development of Windows based applications while also assisting in the access of databases by using ActiveX data objects (ADO) while allowing programmers to use ActiveX control and various objects.

VB continued to evolve throughout the 1990s until Visual Basic 6 was released in 1998, which was replaced by VB .NET. However, Visual Basic for Applications, which is most commonly used today to automate Microsoft Office tasks, is highly compatible with the classic VB 6.

I'm hoping someone from esri can shed some light on some simple coding style. As requested in this idea there is a remarkable lack of sample code in Visual Basic. I've spent much of my career using VB and ArcObjects in ArcMap and now facing the challenge of developing in ArcPro. I would like to avoid having to sink months/possibly years into becoming proficient in c# when I know VB!

I understand that beneath the hood ArcPro is a very different beast requiring different coding styles because of its multi-threaded nature and that many things have to be done differently. That's OK when simple, easy to digest samples are provided to fast track ones self.

Thanks for the pointer to the website. I had actually seen this thread before I posted (i.e. had done my research) and followed the link to the code conversion website and tried their example; problem was is when you paste it into visual studio 2022 it throws an error but gives no real indication why. In my random stumbling around in the vastness of the internet I had seen some comment, probably on this forum, about what seems to be an undocumented addition to the code that needs to be done if you are developing a button for the ArcPro ribbon and that's the inclusion of the command "Async" in the OnClick Sub declaration. I've posted the solution over on GIS StackExchange but provide it here too. It provides a simple VISUAL BASIC template for building code that requires running as a QueuedTask.

If there is anyone from the ESRI documentation team reading this, it would be good if you expand your snippets on the GITHUB site to include some sample code in Visual Basic. Why has ESRI abandoned VB? When you go to the esri git hub site and search for code language in VB it returns nothing!

Then in 1991, Microsoft launched the first version of Visual Basic. Visual Basic allows people to build new apps by moving around code blocks and creating flowcharts or diagrams, and includes tools like a debugger and source code editor. But Visual Basic is more accurately known as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), in which a text-based programming language (Basic) is combined with other visual tools to make it easier to work with code. Visual C and Visual Java are similar visual development environments for their respective programming languages.

IDEs are an important stepping stone to understanding how programming can be made purely visual. One of Bubble's founders, Josh Haas, got the idea for Bubble in 2012 from Visual Basic. He describes the early days of Bubble as the result of "if you started with an IDE before building the programming language underneath it."

Visual programming languages are great tools for teaching new coders how to think logically. Scratch, created by the MIT Media Laboratory in 2002, is probably the best example of a visual programming language with "block"-based syntax. Scratch became fairly popular, with over 57 million users and applications. Some modern no-code app builders like Thunkable were inspired by Scratch and other block-based designs.

Scratch is mostly for kids, with its cute tiger and colorful blocks that link together to form logical sentences that execute actions. But if you were to dive deeper, block-based systems come with some flaws when representing complex logic; you often end up with messy diagrams that are even harder to understand than text-based code.

We're not going to get too deeply into whether words or pictures are easier to understand for the human brain. But there's a case to be made that the wide use of text-based programming languages is largely a result of how long people have used these tools (Unix and Linux are some of the earliest text-based software) and how easy the language creator finds it to be, not the users of the programming language. After all, most programming languages are based on English, and there are billions of people around the world who don't speak or write in English at all.

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