Visual Basic is a more complex and updated version of an old programming language known as BASIC. BASIC stands for Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
BASIC became popular as a simple high-level programming language due to its simplicity and its ease to learn, that why most people now probably learnt to program with BASIC.
So what about Visual Basic then? Well back in the day around 1984 there were two competing software companies, Apple and Microsoft. The Apple Macintosh had a BASIC language called MacBasic it allowed a kind of Object Oriented way of programming and the use of controls to build a GUI (Graphical User Interface).
Then along came Hypercard written by one of Apple’s top programmers. This again “copied” or a alternative was developed by Microsoft that became Visual Basic in Windows 3.0. And now there was Visual Basic that has moved from Version 1 on Windows 3.0 to Visual Basic.NET on the Win32 platform.
For more history information check out the links below.
Below you will find the notes I used to teach the course, they cover the basics then some more advanced concepts, I hope they are of use to someone! They are in alphabetical, but most topics build on something more basic before.
All files are provided in Microsoft Word 2000 format, please see the attachments to this post.
The documents shown here are composite documents of my own work and the odd bits from other people’s Visual Basic documentation from the Internet. Many thanks to those who provide any information on Visual Basic it helped me compile this lot!
Related Links
http://www.hitmill.com/programming/vb/beginner.html – Good history of Visual Basic.
http://www.vbexplorer.com/VBExplorer/VBExplorer.asp – A useful resource.
http://www.officecomputertraining.com/vbtutorial/tutpages/default.asp – All you need to know about Visual Basic.
Visual-Basic-Tutorial.zip – The tutorial documents.