Visual Basic is one of the high level programming languages. It is developed from Basic. Basic stands for Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
Visual Basic was basically designed for easy learning and for easy usage. The instructions look like English Language. Basic is a text based programming language and the program execution is carried out sequentially, but in Visual Basic, programming is done in a graphical environment. In short the programs consists of many subprograms which has its own code, and also can be executed independently. Although Visual Basic is not an object-oriented programming language it has an object oriented philosophy, also called as event-driven language since each object will react to various events such as a key press. Visual Basic is based on RAD system of development. It is so called because it enables programmers to build prototype quickly.
Visual Basic was introduced in the year 1991 in Atlanta, Georgia as version 1.0. The basic concept behind this is connecting the programming language to the graphical user interface, which is derived from a prototype called Tripod. And Alan Cooper developed this Tripod. Microsoft along with Alan Copper and his associates developed Tripod into a programmable shell for Windows 3.0, under the code name Ruby. Ruby is meant for visual part for Visual Basic contains editing tools, along with the ability to load dynamic link libraries that contains some additional controls. Visual Basic has developed well as years passed. And currently it has developed up to version 6
Visual Basic has wide application in Microsoft application such as Microsoft Office, and also in AutoCAD, WordPerfect 2002, and ESRI ArcGIS. The latest versions of Visual Basic has easy to use applications, drag and drop interface designer, code colorization, syntax checking. Auto correct option can fixes more than 230 common programming errors.
