Visual Basic Programming

Visual Basic (VB) is a third-generation event-driven programming language and associated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft for its COM programming model. Visual Basic was derived from BASIC and enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using DAO, RDO, or ADO, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects. Scripting languages such as VBA and VBScript are syntactically similar to Visual Basic, but perform differently.

A programmer can put together an application using the components provided with Visual Basic itself. Programs written in Visual Basic can also use the Windows API, but doing so requires external function declarations.

The final release was version 6 in 1998. Microsoft's extended support ended in February 2008 and the designated successor was Visual Basic .NET.

Visual Basic was designed to be easy to learn and use. The language not only allows programmers to create simple GUI applications, but can also develop complex applications as well. Programming in VB is a combination of visually arranging components or controls on a form, specifying attributes and actions of those components, and writing additional lines of code for more functionality. Since default attributes and actions are defined for the components, a simple program can be created without the programmer having to write many lines of code. Performance problems were experienced by earlier versions, but with faster computers and native code compilation this has become less of an issue.

Although programs can be compiled into native code executables from version 5 onwards, they still require the presence of runtime libraries of approximately 2 MB in size. This runtime is included by default in Windows 2000 and later, but for earlier versions of Windows or Windows Vista, it must be distributed together with the executable.

Visual Basic has the following traits which differ from C-derived languages:

a. Boolean constant True has numeric value -1. This is because the Boolean data type is stored as a 16-bit signed integer. In this construct -1 evaluates to 16 binary 1s (the Boolean value True), and 0 as 16 0s (the Boolean value False). This is apparent when performing a Not operation on a 16 bit signed integer value 0 which will return the integer value -1, in other words True = Not False. This inherent functionality becomes especially useful when performing logical operations on the individual bits of an integer such as And, Or, Xor and Not. This definition of True is also consistent with BASIC since the early 1970s Microsoft BASIC implementation and is also related to the characteristics of microprocessor instructions at the time.

b. Logical and bitwise operators are unified. This is unlike all the C-derived languages (such as Java or Perl), which have separate logical and bitwise operators. This again is a traditional feature of BASIC.

c. Variable array base. Arrays are declared by specifying the upper and lower bounds in a way similar to Pascal and Fortran. It is also possible to use the Option Base statement to set the default lower bound. Use of the Option Base statement can lead to confusion when reading Visual Basic code and is best avoided by always explicitly specifying the lower bound of the array. This lower bound is not limited to 0 or 1, because it can also be set by declaration. In this way, both the lower and upper bounds are programmable. In more subscript-limited languages, the lower bound of the array is not variable. This uncommon trait does exist in Visual Basic .NET but not in VBScript.

OPTION BASE was introduced by ANSI, with the standard for ANSI Minimal BASIC in the late 1970s.

d. Relatively strong integration with the Windows operating system and the Component Object Model.

e. Banker's rounding as the default behavior when converting real numbers to integers with the Round function.

f. Integers are automatically promoted to reals in expressions involving the normal division operator (/) so that division of an odd integer by an even integer produces the intuitively correct result. There is a specific integer divide operator (\) which does truncate.

g. By default, if a variable has not been declared or if no type declaration character is specified, the variable is of type Variant. However this can be changed with Deftype statements such as DefInt, DefBool, DefVar, DefObj, DefStr. There are 12 Deftype statements in total offered by Visual Basic 6.0. The default type may be overridden for a specific declaration by using a special suffix character on the variable name ( for Double, ! for Single, & for Long, % for Integer, $ for String, and @ for Currency) or using the key phrase As (type). VB can also be set in a mode that only explicitly declared variables can be used with the command Option Explicit.

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