Despite much of the hate VB has gotten over the years, it served an insanely important purpose in the rise of internal business software. When I was at MSFT, me and the PM who owned the compilers for VB.NET and C# did a usergroup tour through Florida and I was amazed at how much of their world still runs on VB6 applications. Something like 1/3 of insurance software still does. It was one of the biggest reasons that Microsoft had to keep extending support for XP.<p>The transition from VB6 to VB.NET was a really sad one as it lost a lot of people - .net is a lot more difficult than 6 was. The result is that an entire group of people simply stopped making software and now we have businesses running on applications that are more than 20 years old that some random person in the company threw together over a week. There's a huge gulf between building a VB6 app and throwing together a web app today and despite much of the progress that has been made, we've taken some big steps back in terms of accessibility.<p>The difference between VB.NET and C# is pretty superficial, but I sincerely hope that someday people can experience the magic that something like VB6 offered. A lot of people got their start in programming thanks to it (myself included) and it's sad that it fell by the wayside to make way for "real programming."
I first learned to program in VB6 when I was 14 in a high school class. I remember being so excited by programming that I flipped to the back of the book and trying to implement the advanced programming problems only a few weeks in. An explanation of Conway's Game of Life caught my eye, and I tried to implement it. Unfortunately, I hadn't yet learned about arrays <i>or</i> loops, so my implementation was just thousands of lines of if statements. It took me hours of copying-pasting and modifying just to get a 5x5 board working, and I remember balking when the book suggested trying to make a 50x50 or 100x100 board. It was at that point I realized all the content in the middle of the textbook might be worth looking at after all!
In a few more days I'll be 26. I started programming with Visual Basic 6, since then I have moved on. From time to time though, I can't help but try it out again now and then. I've seen many programmers start out with it and move on through the field into other languages. Many interesting projects have been made in Visual Basic 6 alone. Everything from private server software, to game cheating tools (packet injections), online rpg game engines, and so on and so forth (and throw in malware in there somewhere too). I am grateful for Visual Basic despite having moved from it, I know many despised it, and some of that group once coded in it, but I have to appreciate my roots despite the good or the bad I still learned programming through VB6. Thank you to whoever has ever worked on Visual Basic 6. Happy belated birthday as well.
Bill giving the first demo of VB 1.0<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMz2Mgs7UU0&t=2m8s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMz2Mgs7UU0&t=2m8s</a>
In 1996 a friend demonstrated to me how to write an calculator in VB 4.0, I was immediately hooked. it opened the GUI world to me. at that time I couldn't read English and all I could was trial-and-error. Couple of weeks later, I coded a traffic simulation and show off to another friend who studied chemistry. Guess what, the guy learnt programming and became CTO of a Chinese internet giant.
I've actually learned programming when I was 12 with Visual Basic! I had a little book called "programming for kids" and it had a trial version of VB6 attached to it(it was fully functional, except that it couldn't export exes). The book had chapters on how to make a calculator, a simple notepad with save/open functionality and then at the end a gem - pong game made in VB. It was amazing. Now I work as a professional game programmer in C++, but I always think fondly of VB.
I quit programming VB 12 years ago after using it for two years. I still vividly remember its syntax, patterns, forms, adodb/dao stuff. It's as if I never stopped coding in it. I've been into many languages since, ending lately with Golang. Nothing felt so easy and accessible as VB. Happy 25th birthday, dear Visual Basic.
Actually VB is dead. VB.net isn't VB any more than JavaScript is Java, and we shouldn't let Microsoft's marketing team pull the wool over our eyes by pretending there's continuity between the two.<p>VB.net is (modulo a few unimportant exceptions) just C# transpiled to a more annoying syntax.
The original Visual Basic was revolutionary. As a long time c programmer, at the time, I saw the custom control market opportunity and jumped in as co-founder of Mabry Software. Life was good, until vb.net.<p>I also wrote a bit, for example:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Basic-How--Definitive-Problem/dp/1878739425/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464042684&sr=1-7&refinements=p_27%3AZane+Thomas" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Basic-How--Definitive-Problem/d...</a>
Nowadays it's almost a meme to hate on VB, but I wrote my first desktop application with VB6 when I was in high school, circa 2000.<p>I knew Basic and a bit of Pascal, but the GUI builder of VB captivated me. It was so easy to create things with it! I quickly embraced it and developed many applications, among which a Scalextric car controller (attached to the voltage of a real car) and a math tutor for kids which got me a grant on my first year of college. It was pretty crappy but I still hold VB6 in my heart :)
Its interesting how much hatred there is for visual basic these days. I understand, its the bane of my existence right now replacing thousands of things written with it. But I never stop being amazed at how successful it was. People who had no business programming were able to get stuff done with it. Imagine if MS didn't corner itself and ultimately kill the language by implementing only for windows?
VB6 was amazing as a first language. When I learned to code for the first time I was an impatient kid and I just wanted to see my programs compile and run on a nice GUI, vb6 gave me that and I wish it was still around for my younger brother to learn how to code with it.
I have a lot of fond memories of VB6, as I started using it for an internship in college, when then I got hired full-time after graduation to keep up the app, as the sole developer/IT professional at the company. VB6 had its flaws, certainly, but as a 21 year old kid figuring out how to architect a software system, get projects done, and get the system working on the existing Novell Netware infrastructure, I didn't need to fight with C++ or deal with the vagaries of Delphi. VB6 was a great tool, VB.NET became a different tool, and I wish for the sake of not-really-programmers everywhere, VB7 had existed.
I find it quite interesting that 90% of the comments here associate VB to VB6. It's a bit like if 90% of the comments on the anniversary of python would be about python 2 and how people missed it (or not)...
I'm now old.<p>VB actually got me into Windows development - coming from C & DOS, at the time the message pump was difficult for me to grasp.<p>For LOB apps, VB1-6 was the most productive language by far.
VB 1.0 was a revolution, really. I went on to buy Delphi and Paradox. Delphi was really something but the nod has to go to VB for the massive leap it took.
It's not just 25 years for VB, it's 25yrs for all those GUI developers who grew up starting with VB. Now we're on Qt, JavaFX and React but as I write this I can't help but think - VB is more productive than React ;-)
I had the most amazing experience learning how to program in VB6. It is, to this day, still the most amazing experience of creating desktop applications I ever had. Partially because I had a really awesome high school professor at that time, but still...<p>In my final year of high school, I decided on my own to try using the latest .NET version of Visual Basic for my graduation project. It wasn't hard, it was just a little bit more complicated and a bit disappointing experience when compared to VB6. My project was working, but not perfectly. I felt like I could ace it in VB6, but it felt way too outdated to be usable in the long run (turns out I was right, Microsoft killed XP, my high school switched to Office 365 and Windows 7, therefore, my VB6 project would be unusable now by the school administration).<p>I still feel the nostalgia whenever I think about how easy was to program in that thing.
I work at an investment bank and I have daily contact with VB. It's awful and I wish it had some modern features like try catch blocks, but to automate simple tasks in Excel or Outlook it seems to be the only option.<p>Though powershell shows promise it doesn't run inside the Excel runtime and its a pain convincing others to use it.
I started work at the tail-end of the VB6 (legacy systems were maintained with VB6, new work was done in .NET). We lost a lot of good people in the transition.<p>Unfortunately, many modern developers (including me) avoid VB, in all its incarnations, and there is a fair amount of technical snobbery in the dev world (there always was-even in the VB6 world). The RAD tools currently on the market demo well, but don't seem to lend themselves to more complex use-cases. In the absence of good evidence to the contrary, draggy-droppy RAD is looked down upon, in favor of markup based approaches, and inappropriate complexity is worn as a badge of honor (gross generalization, but I think valid for a substantial chunk of the business development world).<p>An Agile development process, coupled with a solid RAD platform should yield interesting results.
VB was the Rails of its day.<p>It wasn't perfect but you could make really useful apps really fast and (relatively speaking) they didn't look like shit.<p>I guess I should say it was the Rails + Bootstrap of its day.<p>I got a ton done with VB. It was a nice start to my career. I'm grateful for it.
I did a few programs in VB in the early 90's. It was pretty easy to buy components and get data out of our database. It was also quite nice for writing a program that generated lesson plans from a score on the LAP / E-LAP assessments.<p>I admit I was amazed at the ability to buy VBX components to do so many amazing things. It was really easy to plug them into your programs and get stuff running.<p>I did cheat a bit and use a module that made the GUI of the programs I wrote look like the NeXTSTEP screen I was using at the time.
While HTML was the first kind of code I ever wrote, I never felt like I was doing much more than I was when I typed up something in Microsoft Works. It wasn't until I used VB when I was 13 or 14 that it hit me that I could actually make computers do what I wanted.
I think the major benefit of VB was that they put the UI stuff front and center.<p>This in that you first placed the button, and then wrote the code "inside" that button.<p>Most dev tools seems to treat the UI thing as something you do in a parallel track to the code, or create via code.
VB6 was magic during those days. VB6 played a great role in making computers useful to small businesses and widespread adoption of computers. It also reduced the cost of software development.
I look back on Visual Basic with a mixture of trepidation and fondness. If you were a programmer who had experience of building well structured applications in C++, Python etc. then you could get a lot of stuff done and built on Windows. If you inherited a bad application, however....it was really bad. You can't deny its importance to desktop applications though.<p>The switch to VB.Net was the first time that you couldn't simply take your existing code and recompile it in a new version and carry on adding new features. That's where VB.Net, and .Net in general, simply didn't take off. Most people found out they simply didn't need or even want the complexity of full object oriented development either.<p>What Microsoft should have done was built a rapid development environment on top of .Net, distinct from programming in C#, that allowed you to take classic VB code and simply recompile it. The switch to .Net has never really happened for Microsoft and if anyone has been rewriting applications they are as web applications or mobile apps - which Microsoft are not a part of. It will be seen as a pivotal moment where Microsoft simply lost developers. You see it now with pandering to bringing Bash to Windows, amongst other things. No one cares about Windows development.