HIGHLIGHTS
Visual Basic
Can you recall BASIC? It looked something like
100 REM Hello World Program
200 CLS
300 Print "Hello World"
400 End
or
100 Let a = 1
200 Goto 500
300 Gosub 700
400 On c% Goto 200, 800....
Basic programming has not been taken seriously most programmers as it was not a powerful programming tool.
Microsoft's Visual Basic 5.0, however, is a serious development tool. As soon as you start up the program
you are presented with a point-and-click selection of basic framework. Using the VB Application Wizard you
can generate the framework for a program in just a few minutes. Create windows and dialogs, drag and drop controls, and
before you know it you have much of the user interface working and you haven't even written a line of code.
When you do start writing code, you are in for another couple of surprises. The first of these is rhat the layout
is completely object oriented.
Each window, each dialog and each control is an object. You define properties from a list then you write code to handle
events that affect the objects. Simple, clean and easy to manage. Secondly, you will find that Basic has come a long way
since Bill Gates was writing interpreters. It now supports abstract data types, function calls and many of the other
nice stuffs which non-Basic programmers have become accustomed. However, for all of the improvements, I'm not sure
that I would like to write heavy number-crunching or complex processing code in VB. There are certainly some problems
still better solved in C, C++ or Fortran. The good news is, that's not a problem either. You can simply call C, C++ or Fortran
functions from a DLL.
Perhaps the most valuable feature of VB 5.0 is the Jet Database Engine. The Jet Engine, despite its cute name, provides a
quick and powerful interface to a variety of databases: Access, dBASE, FoxPro, Paradox, Excel and plain text. Simply
link some controls to fields in the database and you have an instant client/server application. If you need a little more
flexibility you can even execute SQL statements.
All in all, VB 5.0 is a powerful, flexible development tool. It is beautifully suited to rapid application development, particularly
for prototyping. There is, however, one warning I would add. While VB 5.0 is quite suitable for developing enterprise applications using
good design methodology, there is always going to be a big temptation to skimp on the design stage and simply pump out applications
quickly using the RAD (Rapid Application Development) tools. I suggest you resist this temptation for all but the trivial applications,
otherwise you are likely to create a real maintenance nightmare in the long term.
fvb@eof