Visual Basic Wikipedia. This article is about the Visual Basic language shipping with Microsoft Visual Studio 6. For the Visual Basic language shipping with Microsoft Visual Studio. NET or later, see Visual Basic. NET. Visual Basic is a third generationevent driven programming language and integrated development environment IDE from Microsoft for its Component Object Model COM programming model first released in 1. Microsoft intended Visual Basic to be relatively easy to learn and use. Visual Basic was derived from BASIC, a user friendly programming language designed for beginners, and it enables the rapid application development RAD of graphical user interface GUI applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or Active. X Data Objects, and creation of Active. X controls and objects. A programmer can create an application using the components provided by the Visual Basic program itself. Writing Your First Visual Basic 6 Program The following tutorial is being provided courtesy of Microsoft Press. It has been extracted from Microsoft Visual Basic 6. Visual Basic books for all levels of visual basic programmers are featured and reviewed regularly. Only those Visual Basic books of highest quality appear on this site. Microsoft and the abandonment of Visual Basic 6. Visual Basic was the most popular programming language in the world, yet Microsoft froze its development in favour of. Visual Basic Tutorials provides hundreds of FREE lessons and sample codes to help you understand and master Visual Basic programming. Visual Basic 6 Microsoft' title='Visual Basic 6 Microsoft' />Welcome to VB6. Visual Basic 6 is still very alive and active. Many business have huge applications written in this great language. Wouldnt it be nice to have. A programming language and environment developed by Microsoft. Based on the BASIC language, Visual Basic was one of the first products to provide a graphical. Over time the community of programmers developed third party components. Programs written in Visual Basic can also use the Windows API, which requires external function declarations. The final release was version 6 in 1. Visual Basic. On April 8, 2. Microsoft stopped supporting Visual Basic 6. IDE. The Microsoft Visual Basic team still maintains compatibility for Visual Basic 6. Windows Vista, Windows Server 2. R2, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8. Windows Server 2. Windows 1. 0 through its It Just Works program. In 2. Visual Basic 6. Visual Basic. NET. In 2. 01. Visual Basic 6. In 2. 01. 6, Visual Basic 6. The 1. 9th Annual D. I. C. E. Awards. 1. 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. Language featureseditLike the BASIC programming language, Visual Basic was designed for an easy learning curve. Programmers can create both simple and complex GUI applications. Programming in VB is a combination of visually arranging components or controls on a form, specifying attributes and actions for those components, and writing additional lines of code for more functionality. Since VB defines default attributes and actions for the components, a programmer can develop a simple program without writing much code. Programs built with earlier versions suffered performance problems, but faster computers and native code compilation has made this less of an issue. Though VB programs can be compiled into native code executables from version 5 on, they still require the presence of around 1 MB of runtime libraries. Core runtime libraries are included by default in Windows 2. Earlier versions of Windows 9. NT, require that the runtime libraries be distributed with the executable. An empty form in Visual Basic 6. Forms are created using drag and drop techniques. A tool is used to place controls e. Controls have attributes and event handlers associated with them. Default values are provided when the control is created, but may be changed by the programmer. Many attribute values can be modified during run time based on user actions or changes in the environment, providing a dynamic application. For example, code can be inserted into the form resize event handler to reposition a control so that it remains centered on the form, expands to fill up the form, etc. By inserting code into the event handler for a keypress in a text box, the program can automatically translate the case of the text being entered, or even prevent certain characters from being inserted. Visual Basic can create executables EXE files, Active. X controls, or DLL files, but is primarily used to develop Windows applications and to interface database systems. Dialog boxes with less functionality can be used to provide pop up capabilities. Controls provide the basic functionality of the application, while programmers can insert additional logic within the appropriate event handlers. For example, a drop down combination box automatically displays a list. When the user selects an element, an event handler is called that executes code that the programmer created to perform the action for that list item. Alternatively, a Visual Basic component can have no user interface, and instead provide Active. X objects to other programs via Component Object Model COM. This allows for server side processing or an add in module. Sound Drivers Toshiba. The runtime recovers unused memory using reference counting, which depends on variables passing out of scope or being set to Nothing, avoiding the problem of memory leaks common to other languages. There is a large library of utility objects, and the language provides basic support for object oriented programming. Unlike many other programming languages, Visual Basic is generally not case sensitivethough it transforms keywords into a standard case configuration and forces the case of variable names to conform to the case of the entry in the symbol table. String comparisons are case sensitive by default. The Visual Basic compiler is shared with other Visual Studio languages C, C. Nevertheless, by default the restrictions in the IDE do not allow creation of some targets Windows model DLLs and threading models, but over the years, developers have bypassed these restrictions. Characteristicsedit. The code windows in Visual Basic, showing a function using the If, Then, Else and Dim statements. Visual Basic builds upon the characteristics of BASIC. There are no line numbers as in earlier BASIC, code is grouped into subroutines or methods Sub. End Sub. Code Statements have no terminating character other than a line ending carriage returnline feed. Versions since at least VB 3. Code comments are done with a single apostrophe character. This is a comment. Looping statement blocks begin and end with keywords Do. Loop, While. End While, For. Next. 2. 0Multiple variable assignment is not possible. A B C does not imply that the values of A, B and C are equal. The Boolean result of Is B C is stored in A. The result stored in A would therefore be either false or true. Boolean constant True has numeric value 1. This is because the Boolean data type is stored as a 1. In this construct 1 evaluates to 1. Boolean value True, and 0 as 1. Boolean value False. This is apparent when performing a bitwise Not operation on a 1. 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 1. Microsoft BASIC implementation and is also related to the characteristics of CPU instructions at the time. Logical and bitwise operators are unified. This is unlike some C derived languages such as Perl, which have separate logical and bitwise operators. This again is a traditional feature of BASIC. 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.