VISUAL BASICS

TRIPOD& MICROSOFT gave birth to Visual Basics

during May 1991 at World Trade show in Atlanta, Georgia it is programming software that enables swift application development of GUI applications.

Project 'Thunder' was initiated

Visual Basic 1.0 (May 1991) was released for Windows at the Comdex/Windows World trade show in Atlanta, Georgia. Visual Basic 1.0 for DOS was released in September 1992. The language itself was not quite compatible with Visual Basic for Windows, as it was actually the next version of Microsoft's DOS-based BASIC compilers, QuickBASIC and BASIC Professional Development System. The interface used a Text user interface, usingextended ASCII characters to simulate the appearance of a GUI.

Visual Basic 2.0 was released in November 1992. The programming environment was easier to use, and its speed was improved. Notably, forms became instantiable objects, thus laying the foundational concepts of class modules as were later offered in VB4. Visual Basic 3.0 was released in the summer of 1993 and came in Standard and Professional versions. VB3 included version 1.1 of the Microsoft Jet Database Engine that could read and write Jet (or Access) 1.x databases. Visual Basic 4.0 (August 1995) was the first version that could create 32-bit as well as 16bit Windows programs. It has three editions; Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. It also introduced the ability to write non-GUI classes in Visual Basic. Incompatibilities between different releases of VB4 caused installation and operation problems. While previous versions of Visual Basic had used VBX controls, Visual Basic now used OLE

controls (with files names ending in .OCX) instead. These were later to be named ActiveX controls.

With version 5.0 (February 1997), Microsoft released Visual Basic exclusively for 32bit versions of Windows. Programmers who preferred to write 16-bit programs were able to import programs written in Visual Basic 4.0 to Visual Basic 5.0, and Visual Basic 5.0 programs can easily be converted with Visual Basic 4.0. Visual Basic 5.0 also introduced the ability to create custom user controls, as well as the ability to compile to native Windows executable code, speeding up calculation-intensive code execution. A free, downloadable Control Creation Edition was also released for creation of ActiveX controls. It was also used as an introductory form of Visual Basic: a regular .exe project could be created and run in the IDE, but not compiled. Visual Basic 6.0 (Mid 1998) improved in a number of areas including the ability to create web-based applications. VB6 has entered Microsoft's "non-supported phase" as of March 2008. Although the Visual Basic 6.0 development environment is no longer supported, the runtime is supported on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. Mainstream Support for Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 ended on March 31, 2005. Extended support ended in March 2008 In response, the Visual Basic user community expressed its grave concern and lobbied users to sign a petition to keep the product alive. Microsoft has so far refused to change their position on the matter. (but see) Ironically, around this time (2005), it was exposed that Microsoft's new anti-spyware offering, Microsoft AntiSpyware (part of the GIANT Company Softwarepurchase), was coded in Visual Basic 6.0.] Its replacement, Windows Defender, was rewritten as C++ code.

LANGUAGE FEATURES & CHARACTERISTICS

Like the BASIC programming language, Visual Basic was designed to be easily learned and used by beginner programmers. The language not only allows programmers to create simple GUIapplications, but can also develop complex applications. 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 1 MB in size. This runtime is included by default in Windows 2000 and later, but for earlier versions of Windows like 95/98/NT it must be distributed together with the executable. Forms are created using drag-and-drop techniques. A tool is used to place controls (e.g., text boxes, buttons, etc.) on the form (window). 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), ActiveX 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 will automatically

display its list and allow the user to select any element. An event handler is called when an item is selected, which can then execute additional code created by the programmer to perform some action based on which element was selected, such as populating a related list. Alternatively, a Visual Basic component can have no user interface, and instead provide ActiveX objects to other programs via Component Object Model (COM). This allows for serverside processing or an add-in module. The language is garbage collected using reference counting, has a large library of utility objects, and has basic object oriented support. Since the more common components are included in the default project template, the programmer seldom needs to specify additional libraries. Unlike many other programming languages, Visual Basic is generally not case sensitive, although it will transformkeywords into a standard case configuration and force the case of variable names to conform to the case of the entry within the symbol table. String comparisons are case sensitive by default, but can be made case insensitive if so desired. The Visual Basic compiler is shared with other Visual Studio languages (C, C++), but restrictions in the IDE do not allow the creation of some targets (Windows model DLLs) and threading models. [EDIT]CHARACTERISTICS Visual Basic has the following traits which differ from C-derived languages:

Multiple assignment available in C language 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 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.[5] This definition of True is also consistent with BASIC since the early 1970s 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. 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.

Relatively strong integration with the Windows operating system and the Component Object Model. The native types for strings and arrays are the dedicated COM types, BSTR and SAFEARRAY.

Banker's rounding as the default behavior when converting real numbers to integers with the Round function. ? Round(2.5, 0) gives 2, ? Round(3.5, 0) gives 4. Integers are automatically promoted to reals in expressions involving the normal division operator (/) so that division of one integer by another produces the intuitively correct result. There is a specific integer divide operator (\) which does truncate. 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 asDefInt, 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.