| Since its introduction in 1991, Microsoft Visual Basic has enjoyed unprecedented success. In fact, in slightly more than a decade, it has become one of the world's most widely used programming languages, with millions of productive developers using various flavors of the language. The reason for this success is twofold. First, Visual Basic has excelled as a rapid application development (RAD) environment for corporate and commercial applications. Second, Visual Basic offers a programming language and development environment noted for its simplicity and ease of use, making it an extremely attractive choice for those new to programming. With the introduction of the .NET platform, Microsoft also released a new version of the Visual Basic language, Visual Basic .NET. VB.NET is a from-the-ground-up rewrite of Visual Basic that not only adds a number of new features but also differs significantly from previous versions of Visual Basic. From a high-level view, two of these differences are especially noteworthy: Until the release of .NET, Microsoft focused on creating a unified version of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the language engine used in Visual Basic, which could serve as a "universal batch language" for Windows and Windows applications. With Version 6 of Visual Basic, this goal was largely successful: VB 6.0 featured VBA 6.0, the same language engine that provided macro language functionality to the Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft Project, Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft Visio, and a host of popular third-party applications such as AutoDesk's AutoCAD and Corel's WordPerfect Office suite. With the release of .NET, this emphasis on a unified programming language has, for the moment at least, faded into the background; .NET did not become the macro language platform for Microsoft Office or other applications. (That may change over time; SQL Server 2005, for instance, provides significant support for stored procedure scripting using .NET languages.) Since Version 4, Visual Basic had increasingly been used with COM and ActiveX. The development of ActiveX components was generally straightforward in VB, and the language could also take advantage of an increasing number of Microsoft-supplied and third-party ActiveX components, including ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), Collaborative Data Objects (CDO), and the Outlook object model. Although .NET supports COM for reasons of backward compatibility, it is designed primarily to work with .NET Framework-generated components rather than with COM.
You may be wondering why Microsoft would totally redesign a programming language and development environment that is so wildly successful. As you shall see, there is some method to this madness. |
