Microsoft Visual Basic

Microsoft's Visual Basic was initially developed for OS/2 and combined the in-house developed language called "Embedded Basic", with a small database engine previously known as "Omega" and a bought in forms generator that was called "Ruby" into a variation of Basic better suited for development of GUI programs. Embedded Basic was a smaller variation of the QuickBASIC language that MS had offered to OEMs in the latter half of the 80s.

History
Microsoft shipped alpha and beta versions of Visual Basic for OS/2 on their TechNet CD-ROMs including a late version that was production ready. The split of Microsoft and IBM over the future of OS/2 made them decide not to ship the OS/2 product. Rven the initial version of Visual Basic for Windows contained references to OS/2 and Presentation Manager.

Microsoft has discontinued the development of Visual Basic altogether but has a development system available for current versions of Windows that has some similarities with VB called "Visual Basic for .NET", although the similarities are not as great as the name implies.

When Microsoft discontinued the sale of Microsoft Basic PDS in favour of Visual Basic it caused quite a lot of resentment in the developer continuity, VB was a lot smaller language than PDS and outside of the forms generator the development tools supplied with VB were much less advanced, although they did get greatly enhanced over the product's lifetime. A number of hard core Basic programmers went on to products such as Power Basic and GFA Basic, when Visual Basic itself was discontinued in favour of VB.NET there was a similar upheaval.


 * Visual Basic Script (VBScript, VBS)
 * Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)

Versions

 * Version 1 Beta - Last version that shipped as a native OS/2 program.
 * DOS
 * Sep 1992: Version 1 for DOS - The only version that could generate DOS executables
 * Standard Edition
 * Professional Edition
 * Windows
 * 1.0 (May 1991) - Standard Edition, Professional Edition
 * Mar 1992: Visual Basic with Professional Toolkit
 * 2.0 (Nov 1992) - Standard Edition, Professional Edition
 * 3.0 (Aug 1993) - Standard Edition, Professional Edition
 * 4.0 (Aug 1995) - Standard Edition, Professional Edition
 * The first version that could generate 32-bit code and the last that could be used to create 16-bit Windows executables that run under Win-OS/2.
 * Windows (32-bit only)
 * 5.0 (Feb 1997) - Standard Edition, Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition
 * Service Pack 3
 * 6.0 (1998)
 * Service Pack 6

Foreign libraries with Visual Basic bindings

 * LibcURL - Internet URL (WWW, FTP, etc) access
 * This probably will not work with the OS/2 or WinOS2 versions.


 * Editor support
 * Boxer - Visual Basic syntax highlighting support built in
 * jEdit - Java based editor - Visual Basic syntax highlighting built in

Publications

 * Visual Basic 3.0 - A Developer's Guide - ISBN 1-55851-392-2
 * Steven Holzner: Advanced Visual Basic 4.0 Programming - M&T Books 1996, ISBN 1-55851-474-0
 * C. Pleas: Inside Visual Basic 5 - Microsoft Press 1996, ISBN 1-57231-348-X

Links

 * Visual Basic 6.0 Downloads