Microsoft Visual Basic
10 Years of Taking the World by Storm
Just over 10 years ago, the process of building a simple Microsoft Windows®–based application could have been described as unruly, complicated, and time-consuming. Building these rich graphical applications—a task we today take for granted—was anything but trivial before the introduction of Visual Basic 1.0 in May 1991.
With Visual Basic, programmers could for the first time implement Windows applications in an intuitive, graphical environment by dragging controls onto a form. By enabling both professional and casual programmers to maximize their productivity, Visual Basic ushered in a renaissance of Windows-based application development.
Now, as we celebrate the tenth birthday of Visual Basic, we look back at the tool that revolutionized the way we build software, and look ahead to the next 10 years of Visual Basic innovation and productivity.
Over the past 10 years, the Visual Basic community has grown to a majority share of the total worldwide developer population. During that time, an entire industry of component vendors grew up around this single product. This, combined with the simplified development of Windows applications, were fundamental components in the realization of Microsoft's vision for Windows-based computing.
"Thunder"
Initially, Visual Basic 1.0 was intended to be a very tactical product. Microsoft had several initiatives in development leading up to Visual Basic 1.0, all of which were intended to develop into long-term, strategic, graphical, object-oriented programming tools. As is typical with version 1.0 products, however, the Visual Basic 1.0 product team was forced to cut features from its long list of ideas in order to actually deliver the product to market. As a result, the first Visual Basic offering included little more than the Embedded Basic technology that had originally shipped in Microsoft QuickBasic 4.0 (Microsoft's threaded p-code and incremental compiler) and a simple shell design tool originally licensed for but never used in Windows 3.0. Approximately 12 months after development on version 1.0 began, Microsoft released this "placeholder" development tool, code-named "Thunder."
A Monumental Shift
From this rather inauspicious beginning came an equally unfathomable outcome: an impact on the computing industry so profound that it forever changed the face of software development and created an explosion in the Windows applications market. Ten years later, it seems so obvious—but at the time, when only a small, select group of people were even capable of building Windows applications, Visual Basic 1.0 represented a monumental shift in application design and a great leap of faith for the development community.
Undeniably radical in its implementation and capabilities, Visual Basic 1.0 spread throughout this community within a matter of months. Shortly after the initial wave of Visual Basic fever, a small but strong following of developers began to wrap their existing code libraries with properties, methods, and events, and to expose them as Visual Basic components called VBXs, or custom controls. Before long, the production of these reusable components grew from a specialized community to a booming industry of control vendors, and helped take Visual Basic from a software achievement to a technological breakthrough.
Figure 1. The Visual Basic 1.0 development environment
Within a year of its initial release, Visual Basic had quickly evolved into a highly strategic developer asset. Microsoft had begun to use Visual Basic internally on a number of its own development projects. As demand for Visual Basic increased, it became clear that developers would require an enhanced, more performant Visual Basic. To address to this growing need, Microsoft announced the availability of Visual Basic 2.0 in November 1992. The second version of Visual Basic, delivered in both Standard and Professional editions, provided developers with significantly improved performance and greater capacity for creating larger, more sophisticated applications. It included more granular debugging support, provided database connectivity through ODBC, and introduced new productivity tools, such as a Properties window, color-coded syntax, and true support for a multiple-document interface (MDI).
Figure 2. The Visual Basic 2.0 Property Browser and expanded toolbox
Enabling Data-Aware Applications
However, as corporate adoption of Visual Basic expanded, so too did the need for a developer tool that enabled robust data-aware applications. Visual Basic 3.0, announced only six months after the release of version 2.0, addressed this need by combining the Microsoft Access 1.1 Database Engine with a rich set of data-aware controls. For the first time, developers could easily bind to data sources in a client/server environment by using an intuitive visual designer. Complementing these features was Data Access Objects (DAO), a complete suite of objects providing programmatic access to the database. Finally, Visual Basic 3.0 expanded the breadth of the development tool by including Crystal Reports, an engine for displaying retrieved data in a variety of customizable formats.
More Powerful Tools
In the years to come, the computing industry would begin to embrace the move to 32-bit computing. The release of Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows NT® drove this adoption and fueled the need for more powerful development tools that could target the new architecture. By this time, Windows Watcher magazine reported that Visual Basic was deployed to more companies (30 percent) than any other programming language. Taking such a large installed base from 16- to 32-bit application development would be a substantial migration task, but it would ensure the prolonged existence of the Visual Basic language and the Visual Basic community. The 32-bit version of Visual Basic—version 4.0—was announced in September 1995 and included the Standard and Professional editions as well as a new edition targeted at enterprise-level and team-based development. Enterprise Edition offered new capabilities such as remote automation, remote data control, and an integrated version of Microsoft Visual SourceSafe® for versioning and configuration management.
Figure 3. 32-bit support in Visual Basic 4.0
Visual Basic versions 5.0 and 6.0—announced in March 1997 and June 1998, respectively—represented major steps toward enabling Visual Basic developers to program with new levels of performance in the loosely coupled environment of the Internet. Features such as the native code compiler introduced performance increases of up to 2,000 percent. The WebClass Designer simplified the creation of Web applications by providing an intuitive object model for the Web server. And The DHTML Page Designer enabled the creation of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0–based applications that combined the richness of Dynamic HTML (DHTML) with the performance and productivity of Visual Basic. Finally, with Control Creation Edition, Visual Basic developers could easily build high-performance, broad-reaching Microsoft ActiveX® Controls that targeted the Internet.
The Next Generation: Visual Basic .NET
Today, we continue to expand the possibilities for the Visual Basic developer. With Visual Basic .NET, we empower Visual Basic developers with unprecedented levels of control and productivity. Through first-class object-oriented constructs, such as inheritance, structured exception handling, and parameterized constructors, Visual Basic programming will become more elegant, simplified, and maintainable. With full access to the Microsoft .NET Framework, Visual Basic developers can, for the first time, take direct advantage of Microsoft's rich platform to build traditional Windows-based applications, thin-client Web applications, next-generation XML Web services, and mobile software.
Figure 4. The Donkey .NET demo, written in Visual Basic .NET. Shaped Windows Forms, rich graphics, object-oriented constructs, and XML Web service integration are all part of Visual Basic .NET.
Over the years, Visual Basic has grown from a hobbyist's toy into an indispensable tool that continues to change the world. It has revolutionized the way we work with information, the way we communicate, and the way we build applications.
Through all of the changes in technology and application architecture in the past 10 years, the Visual Basic community has continued to innovate and surge ahead as leaders in software development and productivity. While it's interesting to look back at the accomplishments achieved, it's important to note that Visual Basic is really just getting started. With Visual Basic .NET, Microsoft provides the foundation to ensure that Visual Basic developers continue to lead this race—now and into the future. Here's to 10 more RAD years!
Information from www.microsoft.com
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