COBOL, FORTRAN & BASIC: THE BEGINNING

VB.NET FROM MICROSOFT: ANOTHER FIRST

In the mid 1950s and early 1960s, the three major programming languages for computers were COBOL, Fortran and Basic. Of these three, Basic, a group of general-purpose, high-level programming languages and an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, was developed in 1964 in the USA. Visual Basic (VB) 1.0 was introduced as a misnomer more than two decades ago, in early 1991, as a drag and drop design for creating a user interface (UI) by one Alan Cooper. Interestingly, VB did not include a programming language. Microsoft, the budding IT colossus of that era, immediately noted its potential when used with its then operative Windows 3.0, and hooked up with Cooper to create a programming language using the extant Basic language so that VB could be brought back into the mainstream and released as such in May 1991.

Facing teething troubles, Visual Basic 1.0 was released as a "Disk Operating System” (DOS) in September 1992 as VB 2.0, a user-friendly programming development with a notable increase in speed. Each passing year saw an upgrade, with VB 6.0 released in 1998 exclusively for 32-bit versions of Windows, with the ability to create web-based applications. VB 6.0 was dropped by Microsoft in 2008 as a prelude to Microsoft’s new application, VB.NET.

According to Microsoft, its .NET Framework was designed to run primarily on Microsoft Windows. Using VB, it consists of two parts, a class library and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) application. Amongst its many properties, this framework provides ‘language interoperability,’ technical jargon that means that each language can use code written in other languages across several programming languages. What is unique to CLR is that its programs can be run in a software environment, as against a hardware environment, an application that facilitates provision of services such as security and memory management.

Integral to Microsoft's .NET platform, VB.Net compiles and runs using the .NET Framework. Microsoft reveals that its new features include inheritance, method overloading, structured exception handling, and more. These capabilities make it easier than ever to create .NET applications, including Windows applications, web services, and web applications. VB.NET is an object-oriented computer programming language, evolving from the classic VB implemented on the .NET Framework. Microsoft provides two main editions of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs- yet another advanced software application) for developing in its commercial software Visual Basic: Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and freeware Visual Basic Express Edition 2012. VB.NET features characteristics like scrolling, forms inheritance, inheritance-based polymorphism, the set up to build secure assemblies, and a host of other cyber applications.