Visual Basic at 10 Years Old

Wow, Visual Basic is ten years old and counting! A milestone like this makes me want to reflect to when I started using VB and happened in my life since then. I’ve been asked more than once how I got started using VB, and now I’ve been given the opportunity to write it down for posterity as the saying goes.

I still vividly remember the first day I used VB. I was working as a computer support person at General Atomics in San Diego, California. My co-worker and friend, Ted Torres, came into my cramped office and threw down the books and floppy disks for VB 2 (which I still have to this day). I believe he did this because he was getting frustrated at my pestering him for help in automating mundane tasks for the department of 300+ people I supported. I eventually wrote a program for General Atomics in VB for DOS with later versions also ran under Windows. Sometimes I wonder if I was one of the few people on Earth whoever wrote an “enterprise” caliber program for VBDOS, but that’s another issue. The important thing is that I still thank Ted publicly every chance I get for introducing me to my programming career.

Little did Ted know that nine years later I’d be asked to write this short essay for Apress to commemorate the tenth anniversary of VB. Little did he know what his prodigy would eventually do:

• Launch, starting in 1994, the Visual Basic Tips and Tricks newsletter which is now a popular Web site (http://www.vbtt .com).
• Write two books (with a third one on the way).
• Work as a Director of Software Engineering at local San Diego companies and now for a company in Chicago.
• Founded and continue to guide the San Diego VB Users Group.
• Teach at a local university (University of California San Diego).
• Write for magazines like Visual Basic Programmers Journal.
• Have his first ever major shareware program reviewed by PC Magazine and Mobile Computing.
• Speak at the Visual Basic Insiders Technical Summit and other computer/ programmer conferences.
• Be interviewed by magazines and even the local San Diego Union Tribune newspaper.
• And probably even more cool things that I just can’t remember right now.

The most important thing is that Ted helped me finally find my niche in life, and for that I’ll be forever grateful. He touched my life, but I like to think that, in return, I’ve touched the lives of many others.

Not only have I found my niche, but so has VB. If you look where VB started, it has gone from a pseudo-code language (it’s funny – most of today’s students have no clue what VB used to be like) to a fully-compiled machine­ code language! If you’ve attended any of Dan Appleman’s lectures, you’ve probably seen how you can even use VB to write programs that run faster than C++ programs! As far as I’m concerned, VB has been, and still is, flat out the fastest way to develop client applications and most COM applications. Though some C++ programmers might still look down upon us, I’ll defend my claim about fast application development to the death! As a matter of fact, I can state that one company I worked for in 1997 couldn’t have released a three-tier, DCOM-based client-server application within a year with only six developers (two VB) if it hadn’t been for the amazing abilities of VB.

Well, we’ve all seen many changes in VB during the last 10 years-a lot good, some not so good-and there are always new features we wished we had. I know that VB has always provided a good programming base that can be easily customized to anyone’s liking with the purchase of a third-party product. Without the third-party component industry, VB might have suffered the same fate as Delphi. VB is great, but what programmers add to it makes it even greater!

Now, we look forward to the great changes in store for us with VB.NET, changes that will take us to a new level and into the next 10 years. I’m looking forward to the ride! Before I start, and at the risk of being politically incorrect, I’d like to convey my heartfelt thanks to two people. I do as much Microsoft-bashing as the next programmer, but on the other hand, I know that I have a job because of Microsoft. That said, I’d like to thank the creator of Visual Basic, Alan Cooper, and the creator of Microsoft, Bill Gates, for giving us VB and for never giving up on it.

This article was originally published on the Apress website.