Visual Basic.

This post is to tell you about the experience I had while studying Visual Basic. But to tell you the truth, I am not a guru who is cogent enough to tell you how enlightening it was...However I wish to take an alternative route at explaining what I want to express. The version of visual basic I had learnt was Version 6.0. Now its an outdated version; currently replaced by VB.net. I had inquired to find out the differences between the both versions. This again lead me to learn more about VB 6.0 and more.

From a platform perspective I should say that VB is a language that allows you to develop applications for the Windows operating system. But now many may see this kind of perspective as something obsolete. However, it is not. Windows is still the dominant platform wherein enterprises run. Plus there is tremendous support from MS which covers almost all possible business sectors. Some may think Java is cross platform. That is true. But I was not all that aware of what Java had to offer. But I'll tell you how ever that vb preceeded java; vb came first. Back then the windows platform ruled. Any business enterprise you could imagine would develop on windows to run their business.

Thus I guess, this was how developers around the world built applications using vb. Windows was a COM - a component object model. This meant that you could add as many features as possible to it. This was something that reflected on to vb as well. Developers saw this as an opportunity to make things work on windows. So there was a time when there was a boost in applications that was developed for windows. Subsequent versions of vb included more features; more wealth for developers. I guess it was the support that ms gave for windows that made vb so loved among developers.

I studied vb at a wrong time I guess. It was long after ms decided to withdraw support for vb. But I was not aware of it. I became aware when I went browsing through vbcity .com - a visual basic forum. This community is one such community among millions that contained people who actively developed in vb. They were hyper-vb-active! But the news that ms withdrew support came like a bomb to me. It was later that I actually grasped how vb popular vb was. There was a whole community that sent a petition to ms to not withdraw support for vb.

That was how popular vb was!!!

If you have worked in vb like how all starters do then you might have wondered how applications like Word or Excel had been created? Well, I looked closely at the menus. Most of the menu items had descriptive icons - like for e.g. take the File>>New... option in Ms Word. It began with wondering how do you put in icons (bitmaps) inside your menus? The normal vb environment, which is used to create applications in windows, does not have in-built support for adding bitmaps to menus. But this problem can be solved by using the Windows API. (API - Application Program Interface). The api is something that makes windows and vb worth exploring.