1.1 A Brief History of Visual Basic

 

1.1 A Brief History of Visual Basic

Visual Basic is a third-generation event-driven programming language first released by Microsoft in 1991.  The final version of the classic Visual Basic was Visual Basic 6. VB6 is a user-friendly programming language designed for beginners. It allows anyone to develop GUI Windows desktop applications effortlessly. Interestingly, many developers still favor VB6 over its successor VB.NET.

 

In 2002, Microsoft released Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET), replacing Visual Basic 6.  Thereafter, Microsoft declared VB6 a legacy programming language in 2008.  However, Microsoft still provides some form of support for VB6. Unlike VB6, VB.NET is a fully object-oriented programming language implemented on the .NET Framework. It was created to cater for the development of the web as well as mobile applications. Subsequently, Microsoft has released many versions of VB.NET: Visual Basic 2005, Visual Basic 2008, Visual Basic 2010, Visual Basic 2012, Visual Basic 2013,  Visual Basic 2015, Visual Basic 2017, Visual Basic 2019 and Visual Basic 2022.  Although the .NET portion was discarded in 2005, all versions of the Visual Basic programming language released since 2002 are regarded as the VB.NET programming language.

 

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2022 in early 2022. VS 2022 allows you to code in different programming languages and different platforms, among them is Visual Basic 2022. The other Programming languages are C# C++, F#, JavaScript, Java and Python.