Visual Basic

Visual Basic is a third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft for its COM programming model first released in 1991. Microsoft intended Visual Basic to be relatively easy to learn and use. Visual Basic was derived from BASIC and enables the rapid application development (RAD)of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects.

A programmer can create an application using the components provided by the Visual Basic program itself. Over time the community of programmers have developed new third party components, keeping this programming language to modern standards. Programs written in Visual Basic can also use the Windows API, which requires external function declarations. Furthermore, new third party functions (which are open source) using part VB6 source code and part embedded machine code, make the Visual Basic 6.0 applications faster than those designed in C++.

The final release was version 6 in 1998 (now known simply as Visual Basic). Though Visual Basic 6.0 IDE is unsupported as of April 8, 2008, the Visual Basic team is committed to “It Just Works” compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 including R2, Windows 7, and Windows 8. In 2014 there are hundreds of thousands of developers who still prefer Visual Basic 6.0 over Visual Basic .NET. Moreover, in recent years both mass media and developers lobbied aggressively for a new version of Visual Basic 6.0.

A dialect of Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), is used as a macro or scripting language within several Microsoft applications, including Microsoft Office.