VB Programming
Amazon Finally it came to my favorite language; what about a big hand for such a great language designed to take my breadth away?The earliest methodology for Windows applications programming was to code directly using calls to the Windows API. The API provided a crude mechanism for creating such items as menus and windows, leaving the developer with an enormous coding task even when creating a rudimentary application.
These early programs were typically created with C compilers that were equally crude by today's standards. As a result, the expectations for what could reasonably be achieved by professional developers were severely limited by schedule and performance constraints.
That's the motivation behind building a 'rapid application development tool' for Windows programming which allows for shorter development time while coding more features and functions more easily.
Visual Basic is one of the rapid application development tools for Windows.
Even since I learned Visual Basic, I started to write many interesting useful programs that have real-world use.
Until then a program was written to either satisfy a course or just for kicks, but never was it written because it could make my life or someone else's easier.
In fact, before then I pretty much had no idea how to make those nifty little '.exe' so that I can just double-click them to run them. VB is the answer to my dilemmas.
It is not difficult to write a program in VB and turn it into a nice executable so that my fellow Windows aficionados only need to double-click it to run it.
What's more; there are a tone of ActiveX controls and component libraries already written for Visual Basic, and you can use them to do some truly powerful stuff. One such example is the Voice Driven Calculator I wrote which uses Microsoft Speech API. I am so hooked to this voice recognition technology that I may use it to do more things with it. Sweet :-)
That said Visual Basic is not the best tool when it comes to performance. Delphi, another rapid application development language, executes code a lot faster simply because Delphi generates compiled executable files.
Browse the menu to see what software applications I've developed with Visual Basic!
