Visual Basic, Ups and Downs

Microsoft Visual Basic has come a long way since 1991 when it was officially declared. Since its introduction, it revolutionized the world of software development. By the way credit to the 'Visual' concept goes to some one else(find out it here). It made software development so easy that soon it became one of the most popular programming languages of all time.



Those days, programming GUI applications was a tedious task. Each part of the GUI had to be created manually by code and events related to each of them had to be handled by code. This was enough mess to forget what the purpose of the software was! Most importantly, programmers had to be quite familiar with the Windows API(Application Programming Interface).  In contrast to other programming languages at the time, anyone completely unaware about the Windows API could program in Visual Basic. More importantly it provided GUI creation as easy as drag-dropping components from Toolbox. This was a giant leap over traditional programming. It's one of the main causes which resulted in bringing programming a general term. However, in the meantime, Visual Basic depended largely on ActiveX controls installed in the system. At design time, this makes application development pretty easy because these controls are already programmed and we don't want to bother creating them manually.

Dependencies

But, even after compilation, rather than directly accessing most of the Win API, VB applications use ActiveX libraries to communicate with the Operating System. In other words, it utilizes more system resources than other apps would. As a result, a compiled VB app would not contain much variety of instructions to make use of Win API. Instead, it contains instructions to call and handover tasks to ActiveXs to get the job done.

Distribution

The plus side of this is that executable becomes relatively light-weighted and compilation becomes less tricky. Downside is that the program becomes largely dependent on extra resources. As a result of this, VB applications require a special runtime environment(a framework) without which a VB app would be helpless and useless. To overcome this problem, it is essential to ensure that runtime files are installed to the system when installing the app. That's what the 'Package and Deployment Utility' all about. But, this didn't became a big necessity since Microsoft start including the basic VB run-time in the Operating System(from Windows XP onward).

Performance

Performance of Visual Basic Applications was also affected by its heavy dependencies- certain system files had to perform a man-in-the-middle type of work which would slow down the whole work. This is why Visual Basic isn't the type of application for developing robust applications.


Today, VB is almost an expired programming language. Windows continue to support it. So, it's not dead yet. VB.NET follow some concepts originated from VB. But has .net got over with the downsides VB provided? may be a few.. Has .net done enough?