Today I saw a post on Facebook by a friend of mine, Anthony Green, about writing his first blog post as a Microsoft employee (he has a personal blog as well, unfortunately he’s not written anything since 2008) – when I saw the title, I couldn’t believe it was 20 years already – seems just yesterday that I wrote about its 15th birthday:
Happy 20th Birthday Visual Basic!
My, what a journey it’s been. Almost fifteen years ago I randomly bought a copy of “Visual Basic 5: Deluxe Learning Edition” – I was just 15 at the time and wanted a new hobby, and writing software seemed like it would be fun. In those early days, I had no idea what career I would choose, and really didn’t intend for software development to become the dominant force in my life – I just wanted a better, more productive way to spend my time during the summer.
In the years that have went by, I became passionate about the field, and all it encompasses (possible obsessed, if you believe my wife) – it’s been the driving force in my life. Today, I manage a team of 6 developers, and have a fun start-up with some friends (that someday won’t cost me money every month) – and all because I bought that book. Overall, I have a lot to thank VB for, it really did get me started in this field.
Today though, my language of choice has moved on to newer options – I prefer bleeding technologies when I can use them – but VB will always have a place in my heart, and I’ll always follow its progress as it continues to transform and adapt to an ever-changing world. As the most popular .NET language (contrary to what many of the C# developers think), it plays a vital role in the development of the framework and the ecosystem.
In the conversations I’ve had with Anthony about the future of the language, I greatly look forward to writing about its 25th birthday; I expect those will be exciting times for the language and the entire .NET ecosystem.
Earlier today, a rather surprising tweet hit, being retweeted at least 80 times, including by a few rather influential people in the .NET world:
@RoyOsherove
Roy OsheroveMicrosoft announces to mvps at #msteched that VB6 will be released as open source on codeplex end of june! w00t
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Needless to say, that’s not an announcement that anybody was expecting, but given the talk going on at the time – and the high-profile people talking about it, there wasn’t much reason to doubt. Announcing a product that has been dead for years is going open source would certainly be a strategy shift for Microsoft, but does it make any sense? Kevin Dente of Herding Code fame certainly thought that Microsoft had better things to release:
@kevindente
Kevin DenteInstead of VB6 I’d rather see MS open source IE6. Then at least we could build a standalone version of it.
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Shortly after the initial tweet, Doug Seven, the Director of Product Management, Visual Studio Tools & Languages, replied asking Roy Osherove (the original poster) to email him. Hmm, it’s starting to smell like something odd is going on. A couple of hours later, Doug set the story straight:
To which, Roy then tried to unset:
It’s worth pointing out that Roy Osherove currently has a full ten-times the followers that Doug Seven has, meaning his altered retweet was seen by more people (at least initially). For several hours word was going around, and accepted by a number of people who thought Microsoft was actually going to open the code to VB6 (including journalists who were too busy writing articles to do any fact checking) – all based on one person who made it all up.
Lesson here: be careful about what you re-tweet, it’s easy to endorse a lie as several people unwittingly did today (@blowdart summed it rather well).
Seeing slowdowns in large VB 2005 projects? Well, I think I just found the answer. There’s now a QFE released that may help address these issues. One of the applications I maintain is a 25,000 line solution made up of 9 projects, I’m hoping this fix will resolve the issues we’ve seen compiling it (not to mention the frequent compiler crashes).
Here’s the list of symptoms addressed:
- You experience a slow response time when you use single-step debugging. For example, the response time is slow when you press F10 to step into a line of code.
- You experience a slow response time when the Error List or the Task List is updated by Visual Studio 2005.
- You experience a slow response time when you use the IntelliSense feature.
Once I hear back from Microsoft support, I’ll post details if it makes any difference.
To celebrate 15 years of Visual Basic, a quick glance to the past:
Microsoft Announces Visual Basic at Windows World ’91 General-Purpose, High-Productivity Programming System for Microsoft Windows
ATLANTA — May 20, 1991 — Microsoft today announced MicrosoftR Visual BasicTM programming system at the Windows World ’91 industry trade show. Visual Basic is a graphical application development system for Microsoft WindowsTM graphical environment version 3.0 that combines visual design tools with a powerful, general-purpose programming language and Windows .EXE compiler. It provides a simple solution to the complex task of creating real Windows-based software applications.
“We set out to create the fastest, easiest way to program for the Windows environment,” said Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and CEO. “My goal from the start was to make developing Windows applications as easy and natural as possible. We also wanted this tool to appeal to a broad spectrum of people interested in programming for Windows — from professional corporate programmers and consultants solving business problems to independent software vendors and casual programmers.”
Visual Basic programming system combines a rich, event-driven programming model with the world’s most widely used programming language in a tightly integrated package. General development for the Windows environment is faster than ever. The Visual Basic programming system provides visual user-interface design capabilities with powerful general-purpose programming tools, making it easy for any programmer to create compiled Windows .EXE files that can be freely distributed without run-time fees or royalties of any kind.
“This is the most important software product of the year, if not the decade,” said Steve Gibson, president of Gibson Research Inc. “It’s the ultimate intellectual tool. Thanks to Visual Basic, both casual and professional programmers can produce compelling and beautiful results. Now it’s easy to put together real Windows version 3.0 applications.”
“We needed to create an application that incorporated Microsoft Word for Windows and Microsoft Excel,” said Craig Ellis, senior programmer analyst, Reuters Information Systems. “Visual Basic was the tool to do this. It filled our needs, allowed us to develop a fast and effective application and cut our development time by more than half. It’s a fantastic product that allowed us to incorporate a family of Microsoft products into one application.”
The Visual Basic programming system can be used to develop any Windows-based application, including corporate business systems, tools and utilities, front ends to data (mainframe, server and local) or commercial Windows software products. It is also useful for integrating multiple Windows-based applications and for automating software testing through dynamic data exchange (DDE).
Visual Basic programming system provides visual design tools for creating the user interface components — windows and dialogs — of an application. A full set of Windows interface components (including command buttons, text fields, list boxes, pictures, drop-down menus and file system controls) are created visually, without writing any code. The forms engine for building the interface incorporates technology acquired from Cooper Software. A powerful, structured programming language is then used to add functionality to these interface components, responding to events that are automatically trapped by the system.
The Visual Basic language is a derivative of the Microsoft QuickBasicTM modern programming system, modified for the graphical environment and the event-driven programming language. It uses a threaded p-code incremental compiler and source-level debugging tools, including an interactive immediate window, in a tightly integrated system.
Extensibility
Support is provided for DDE, the mechanism for exchanging data with other Windows-based applications. The Visual Basic system also supports dynamic link libraries (DLLs), which allow the user to establish links with other Windows systems facilities and call the Windows API or routines written in other languages and compiled into DLLs. The control set itself can be extended by developers using C and the Windows SDK and the Microsoft Visual Basic Control Development Kit, available separately. This extensibility will provide the ability to fully integrate new user interface components into the graphical design and code development environment. Examples could include multimedia, pen controls and data access.
Printed documentation and online Help provide step-by-step instructions for writing programs. The online Help system provides context-sensitive reference information and sample code that can be copied and pasted into a Visual Basic program. An icon library of approximately 400 designs and an icon editor written in Visual Basic language are also included. “The built-in help is excellent,” said Lee Perryman, deputy director of Associated Press Broadcast Services in Washington, D.C. “The debugging features are superb, and the controls are rich and feature-packed. Because there is almost no learning curve for users familiar with the Basic language, Visual Basic makes Windows programming a snap.”
Visual Basic programming system for Windows will be available in June 1991 for a suggested retail price* of $199. German and French versions are expected to ship in August, with other foreign language versions to follow.
The Visual Basic programming system runs in either the standard or enhanced mode of Microsoft Windows graphical environment version 3.0 or higher. The system requirements include a personal computer using 80286 processor or higher; hard disk; mouse; CGA, EGA, VGA, 8514, HerculesR or compatible display; MS-DOSR operating system version 3.1 or later and one or more megabyte of memory.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ “MSFT”) develops, markets and supports a wide range of software for business and professional use, including operating systems, network products, languages and applications as well as books, CD-ROM products and hardware for the microcomputer marketplace.
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Microsoft, the Microsoft logo and MS-DOS are registered trademarks and Microsoft QuickBasic, Visual Basic and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
Hercules is a registered trademark of Hercules Computer Technology.*Prices listed are U.S. suggested retail prices.
It was about 10 years ago that I decided to apply myself to learning Visual Basic, what an interesting journey it’s been.
