MEMO ORGANIZER

Memo Organizer



Memo Organizer

This paper, which is written as a memo, is a computer language profile of the Visual Basic programming language.  This paper is part of the individual requirements of CMGT 576 - Programming Management at the University of Phoenix, in the MS in Computer Information Systems program.  This Visual Basic paper covers: the language origin and history, the language characteristics, a language analysis, and some interesting facts about Visual Basic.

Language Origin And History

VB was derived from a visual style programming environment named Tripod, which was created by Alan Cooper in the late 1980s. 

The table below shows the history of VB.

Version

Year

Operating Environment(s)

1.0

1991

MS DOS 6.22

2.0

1992

Windows 3.0

3.0

1993

Windows 3.1

4.0

1995

Windows 95 and NT

5.0

1996

Windows 9x and NT

6.0

1998

Windows 9x, NT, 2000

VB.NET

2002

Windows 2000, XP

Table 1 - History of VB

The first commercial version of VB 1.0 was developed under contract to Microsoft in 1990 and it ran under MS DOS. (Wikipedia, 2004). Soon came VB 2.0 for Windows, and then in 1993, VB 3.0 was released.  As previously stated, the popularity of Windows on PCs, as well as the desire to have Windows applications helped fuel the popularity of VB.  VB 3.0 provided not only a way to rapidly prototype and develop Windows applications, it also was targeted by a huge market for third-party developer add-in tools, signaling that this was indeed a viable development platform.  VB 3 was also the first version of VB to use the Microsoft ODBC database API to permit networked client/server connectivity with server databases.  Again, this was being in the right place at the right time for VB, because client/server computing was also rapidly becoming the new standard of enterprise application computing.

Coinciding with the release of Windows 95, VB 4 was released in 1995, allowing the creation of both Win16 applications as well as Win32 applications.  In 1996, VB 5 which produced only Win32 applications, was released in three editions (Personal, Professional, and Enterprise), each with even better capabilities to rapidly prototype and build better performing GUI applications.  In 1998, VB 6 was released, with even greater performance enhancements.

Now with its .NET development paradigm, Microsoft has released a new version of VB, now simply called, VB.NET.  It is architected to take advantage of the new network and distributed computing features that Microsoft features in the .NET environment.

Language Characteristics

VB is an event-driven, hybrid development environment consisting of an integrated development environment (IDE) and a language based loosely on the original BASIC programming language.  The IDE consists of a menu, a Forms window, a Toolbox, a Properties window (that changes context based on the windows object that is selected), a Memo positioning window, a Code window, and an advanced Debugger window.

VB permits the compiling and creating of Win32 API executables that execute in any Windows 9x, Windows 2000, and/or Windows XP environments. Except for special emulation software such as SoftPC on the Mac, or in instances where VB programs are written as CGI (Common Gateway Interface) web applications, applications written in VB are confined to the world ...