Visual Basic
... to get tasks done. While this not only lessens the burden on programmers, it also allows more efficient programs to be created which benefits the end-users. Visual Basic is not only a programming language but also a true graphical development environment. This environment allows programmers with little programming experience to quickly develop powerful Windows applications (startvbdotnet.com, 2004). Users weren’t sold on the initial versions of Visual Basic, but beginning with the second version, programmers starting seeing practical use of the language. The initial versions presented some problems for some programmers such as efficiency, not being able to work across different platforms, not having database connectivity, and being inflexible to lower level hardware details (Computer Language Profile, 2004). By the time version three hit the shelves in 1993, many of the issues had been addressed, and Visual Basic was the fastest growing programming package on the market. ODBC database connectivity allowed programmers to store and query data easier than ever before, and some would say that this really blew the doors open for Visual Basic. Evolution Like any language, Visual Basic has been forced to evolve with the quickly changing technologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Versions four, five, and six added some additional functionality and changes to the language, but were mostly introduced to meet the needs of the new Microsoft operating systems that were being introduced (i.e. Windows 95, 98, 2000). Version four provided the capabilities of creating 32 bit and 16 bit applications for the first time, and version five got rid of 16 bit applications all together. Visual Basic 6 was probably the most solid release of the product before .NET technologies came into play. This version was so solid that it lasted for four years without being phased out. That is an extremely long time for a Microsoft product; in fact some companies continue to use Visual Basic 6 instead of the newer VB.NET products. The .NET Revolution VB.NET is Microsoft’s latest release of the product, and it has had mixed reviews among programmers. The two greatest changes in this version are the runtime environments and the flexibility. VB 6 ran on a VB-runtime environment and was an interpreter based language, while VB.NET runs on the new .NET common language runtime environment and is a compiler based language (Programmers Heaven, 2004). VB.NET also allows multithreaded applications to be created, which basically means that multiple threads can access the same set of shared data at the same time. Th...