Visual Basic Application Development

IT Solutions Group, Inc. has experience developing custom Applications using the Visual Basic development software.  The following is a brief overview of Visual Basic and it's features.  For more details on ITSG's experience with Visual Basic please view our Sample Projects.

History

Microsoft released Visual Basic in 1987. It was the first visual development tool from Microsoft, and it was to compete with C, C++, Pascal and other well-known programming languages. From the start, Visual Basic wasn't a hit. It wasn't until release 2.0 in 1991 that people really discovered the potential of the language, and with release 3.0 it had become the fastest-growing programming language on the market.

What Is Visual Basic?

Programmers have undergone a major change in many years of programming various machines. For example what could be created in minutes with Visual Basic could take days in other languages such: as "C" or "Pascal". Visual Basic provides many interesting sets of tools to aid you in building exciting applications. Visual Basic provides these tools to make your life far more easier because all the real hard code is already written for you.

With controls like these you can create many applications which use certain parts of windows. For example, one of the controls could be a button, which we have demonstrated in the "Hello World" program below. First create the control on the screen, then write the code which would be executed once the control button is pressed. With this sort of operation in mind, simple programs would take very little code. Why do it like the poor old "C" programmer who would have to write code to even display a window on the screen, when Visual Basic already has this part written for you.

Even though people tend to say Visual Basic's compiler is far behind the compilers of Pascal and C, it has earned itself the status of a professional programming language, and has almost freed BASIC of the reputation of a children's language. Overall you would class Visual Basic as a Graphics User Interface(GUI). Because as you draw, you write for the program. This must always be remembered in any kind of creation of a Visual Basic program. All in all, VB is the preferred language of many future program mers. If you want to start programming Windows, and don't know how to start, give Visual Basic a shot.

Significant Language Features

Visual Basic is not only a programming language, but also a complete graphical development environment. This environment allows users with little programming experience to quickly develop useful Microsoft Windows applications which have the ability to use OLE ( Object Linking and Embedding ) objects, such as an Excel spreadsheet. Visual Basic also has the ability to develop programs that can be used as a front end application to a database system, serving as the user interface which collects user input and displays formatted output in a more appealing and useful form than many SQL versions are capable of.

Visual Basic's main selling point is the ease with which it allows the user to create nice looking, graphical programs with little coding by the programmer, unlike many other languages that may take hundreds of lines of programmer keyed code. As the programmer works in the graphical environment, much of the program code is automatically generated by the Visual Basic program. In order to understand how this happens it is necessary to understand the major concepts, objects and tools used by Visual Basic

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