Is Visual Basic still used today? I am thinking of taking a coarse on it and want to know how useful it is.?

Question

Is Visual Basic still used today? I am thinking of taking a coarse on it and want to know how useful it is.?

Answer 1

Well, Visual Basic is still alive and work!

Dot NET Framework is new conception of Microsoft for programming and developing applications. It is similar to Java virtual machine. After Visual Studio 6 (containing Visual Basic 6), Visual Studio .NET was presented. It include Visual Basic .NET. It’s believed, that all the programming languages in VS.NET got equal possibilities – VC++NET, Visual C# (New programming Language of Microsoft), Visual Basic.NET and even Microsoft Visual J#. There are more than 30 languages, which work with NET Framework.

Visual Studio 2005 was issued and presented in conjunction with NET Framework 2 last year. It contains Visual Basic NET 2005.

There are so called ‘Express’ editions of applications of VS 2005. Microsoft announced, they are free if you download to the end of 2006. You can download all of the “Express” editions from:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/

Select Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition » (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/) and download it. You can also use Microsoft Development Library for information about Visual Basic programming.

Answer 2

Yes, I know that some folks have thought of Visual Basic as a training tool or a prototyping tool. It truly doesn't deserve the rep it used to have (and apparently still does for some folks). I have worked personally with hundreds of companies that use Visual Basic for production applications at all levels.



The current version of Visual Basic is part of Visual Studio.NET which takes Visual Basic, C#, C++ and even Cobol, RPG, Fortran and other languages and compiles to IL. As a result, your language choice does not, in general limit what you can do or where it can be used. Visual Basic in this environment is a fully Object Oriented language.



Visual Studio.NET with all of its languages is VERY powerful and programmers with skills in those languages, especially C# and Visual Basic.NET are in high demand. It's definitely worth learning.

Answer 3

If you are in school, they teach Visual Basic as a vehicle for delivering concepts. The language you learn is not as critical in university as learning the concepts of programming.



However if you are taking an outside class, I would recommend you pick up a book instead. Visual Basic is great if you want to do things like make quick and easy mock-ups of what software would look like with simple functions. Nobody produces production code in VB anymore, so it's really for learning and prototyping.

Answer 4

There are different versions of Visual BASIC. Visual BASIC.NET is the latest version, the previous version to that was Visual BASIC 6. Many places teach VB.NET. You can still find VB-6 a few places, but because Microsoft is pushing .NET VB6 is becoming more and more scarce.