Visual Basic

an extension of Microsoft Basic that allows for GUI controls, animations, and drag-and-drop features. &nbsp Its main competitors are Borland's Delphi and Sun's Java.&nbsp VB is used in many Microsoft products and in numerous applications by third parties.&nbsp The main web site for Visual Basic at Microsoft is http://www.microsoft.com/vbasic/ .&nbsp Many links are provided at http://www.pcwebopaedia.com/VB.htm .&nbsp VBX is a Visual Basic custom control used in may sofrtware components.&nbsp VBX components allow developers to more quickly write Visual Basic components.&nbsp When used in conjunction with Windows Scripting Host utilities, Visual Basic adds great risks for viruses when using email and web browsing software from Microsoft.&nbsp For more discussion of such matters, see ActiveX .

A programming language and environment developed by Microsoft. Based on the BASIC language, Visual Basic was one of the first products to provide a graphical programming environment and a paint metaphor for developing user interfaces. Instead of worrying about syntax details, the Visual Basic programmer can add a substantial amount of code simply by dragging and dropping controls, such as buttons and dialog boxes, and then defining their appearance and behavior. Although not a true object-oriented programming language in the strictest sense, Visual Basic nevertheless has an object-oriented philosophy. It is sometimes called an event-driven language because each object can react to different events such as a mouse click.Since its launch in 1990, the Visual Basic approach has become the norm for programming languages. Now there are visual environments for many programming languages, including C, C++, Pascal, and Java. Visual Basic is sometimes called a Rapid Application Development (RAD) system because it enables programmers to quickly build prototype applications.