Visual Basic... A name
everybody knows for a rich, easy and GUI based programming language, making each
& every task easier and improves programmer's productivity. VB has won the best
RAD ( Rapid Application Development ) Tool award for three times and still
keeping itself at top.
Microsoft first
started Visual Basic in early 1990s and the project name was "Thunder". After
the launch of VB 5.0, it crosses all the boundaries and won the best RAD Tool
award by beating PowerBuilder in 1998. VB 5.0 came out with some great
enhancements but definitely this time VB.NET has come with revolutionary changes
to make it suitable for next generation of application development.
Many developers today talk about new generation programming languages and don't
count VB 6.0 as a powerful tool for developing good programs, but i would like
to present the surprising data about VB developers given by Bill Gates(The
founder and chief software architect of Microsoft Corp.)
"Since Visual Basic's inception, its community has grown to more than 3 million
professional developers worldwide. In fact, about half the world's developers
now use Visual Basic. The increasing power and richness of the PC provided the
backbone for this amazing growth."
Certainly this seems to be an amazing thing to talk about these details in the
world of Internet Programming and when we know that Java has already taken place
of most popular Internet programming language, but this is hard truth. The only
feature lacking in VB was its Internet capabilities and when we are moving
towards the third generation of the Internet, it becomes important to have
strong Internet Programming capabilities for any programming language. The
industry is focusing on critical distributed computing with web services
capabilities. At this moment VB.NET is definitely a powerful tool to provide all
these solutions in integrated environment of .NET technology. Let us discuss the
major problems with VB 6.0, which has been creating troubles for VB developers
for a long time.
Problems with VB 6.0
-
No capabilities for
multithreading.
-
Lack of implementation
inheritance and other object oriented features.
-
Poor error handling
capabilities.
-
Poor integration with other
languages such as C++.
-
No effective user
interface for Internet based applications.
In VB.NET all these
shortcomings have been eliminated. we will discuss how VB.NET implements all
these features in our subsequent articles one by one. In fact VB gets the most
extensive changes of any existing language in the Visual Studio suite. Let us
talk about the major features VB.NET has developed.
Some new features of VB.NET
-
Full support for
object oriented programming.
-
Structured error handling
capabilities.
-
Access to .NET Framework.
-
Powerful unified Integrated
Development Environment (IDE).
-
Inherent support for XML &
Web Services.
-
Better windows applications
with Windows Forms.
-
New Console capabilities of
VB.NET.
-
New Web capabilities with
Web Forms.
-
Immense power of tools &
controls (including Server Controls).
-
Interoperatibility with
other .NET complined languages.
-
Better database
programming approach with ADO.NET.
... and many more. The
list is very long. Now we have to figure out that how important role VB will
play in future? The answer is there in the words of Bill Gates once again -
"The next 10 years
will be an amazing time for software developers. The advancements in the way we
develop, deploy, and use applications will be as profound as the architectural
shift from DOS- to Windows-based programming. Visual Basic.NET will provide the
foundation for building the solutions that enable a new age of truly distributed
computing on the Internet.
Microsoft sees the
Visual Basic community as a core part of this vision. If you're new to this
community, I welcome you to what promises to be an incredibly exciting era. If
you're a seasoned Visual Basic developer, I thank you for continuing to make it
the world's most popular development tool. I'm confident that Visual Basic.NET
will give you the power to write cutting-edge software for tomorrow's Internet."