What can you do with vb?
 

My computers teacher had some vb books from a couple of years ago and wanted to know if I wanted it. I thought I might take it, but I wanted to do some research on what I could actually do with. I've heard of vb, but never really knew what it was. What kinds of programs have you guys made, and could some one mabey explain vb out for me so I can decide if i want to learn it. Thanks.

vb is great for a quick and easy language. You can develop apps very quickly in it. However, for some more advanced things, VB isn't the best choice, since it's kinda limitated IMHO.

i have made small games, programs with database backends etc..

Yeah, vb is limited. It's a nice little language to start out in. Very easy and rapid for development. If you need quick small things done, use VB. Don't expect to get anything really high end out of it. If i need a quick program to perform a small sorting task or something, I use VB. when I'm making a program that will be used by more than myself, I would use C#. That also depends on it's complexity. If it's simple, I would use vb. Vb is great for simple things IMHO.

It is one of the tools to develop "quick and dirty" applications. You can develop simple applications like "Calculator" etc. There is huge list of components that is accessible, under Visual Basic, that would help you create applications based on existing functionality of the components. For instance, there is color dialog box (the one you see on double clicking any color in MS-Paint, in the color selection box, usually at the bottom of the screen), which is automatically displayed on the screen on the click of a button. If you are able to find the right components and able to put it together, that's it!

You can also access databases(or db apps) such as Microsoft Access, MS-SQL server for database related projects.

Concentrate on the functionality of an application before decorating it, because, there are many tools (usually third party) for "visually appealing" apps.

Yeah! it's an easy language to learn, you can *allmost* make everything with it, but dont expect any heavy games like Battlefield 2 or Unreal. (because VB isn't as fast as C/C++ apps)
I used to build my personal apps or utilities for my needs ie:
- A menu that pops up when inserting a CD. (program executed with autorun.inf)
- Rutinebased backups (compress & burn)
- Movieplayer
- Customized editors
- Small games like any card game
- Jokeing app.

If you were to learn a language like Visual Basic, I'd recommend either Visual Basic .NET (also Visual Basic 2005, which is VB .NET with the ".NET" bit dropped from the name), or C# (another .NET language). Legacy versions of Visual Basic (6 and below) are now unsupported by Microsoft, and for good reason: VB 6 came out in 1998. You can pick up a free copy of VB Express Edition or C# Express Edition from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/. Note that "Express Edition" doesn't mean "for newbies" - they're just missing some enterprise-oriented features. They're also much more powerful than older versions of Visual Basic.

Another choice, if you're interested, is Java - in fact, the .NET Framework was based on the Java libraries. Clicky.

Oh, Piz: "limitated"? What the feck? :p

"What can you do with VB?"

I had to try really hard not to let an 'interesting' answer to that one slip out... :)

Seriously, though, VB is not an awful little language. I 'grew up' on 8-bit micros, where BASIC was pretty common, and graduated to C, C++ and Perl on Linux in my mid teens. I didn't touch VB until I was 24 (very recently) but had developed a very low opinion of it. I think now I was a little unfair.

It's got a few pretty ugly features, it's proprietary, it's certainly a bit archaic and weird, but personally I like the IDE (I'm talking VB6 here; a lot of people disagree with me but I think it's not bad at all). I think really its worst misfeature is that it's not at all portable to real computers (i.e. non-Windows). But you asked what you could do with it, so I guess I should stay on topic (more or less).

I never thought it would be of much use to me, but actually for small business applications, for example those that access databases, it's quite quick and easy to use. ADO is actually not bad and is quite easy to learn. VB itself is very easy to learn, but then I did already have quite a bit of BASIC exposure. I'd say VB doesn't scale well to very large programs, but when things are small and simple and the idea is generally to glue together some database queries with a GUI you're really in VB land.

The company I work for actually uses VB to control a lot of production line systems, some of which I'd have to describe as fairly large scale applications. This is actually why I'm learning VB now; having just recently joined the team that maintains these systems, I need to know the language they're written in. I'm not alone, though, in thinking that VB6 was a fairly poor choice for these systems; there are some suggestions floating around that they will be slowly replaced by C# equivalents over the next couple of years, and it's a good idea: the VB code is a maintenance nightmare.

So really, you can do quite a bit with VB; it's just that above a certain size of program it gets inadvisable. VB6 skills are still reasonably good employment wise; my employer is not the only company with legacy VB systems to maintain. I don't think there's much of a future in VB.NET; even MS don't seem too enamoured with it. The smart money is on open standards, but within the Microsoft context I think it's on C#.

I have found that Visual Basic books are good as door stops.

Care to explain a little?

For me visual basic's a good language to produce software with. I used it for a year and im still using it now. I don't get why everyone says its so shite, I guess its because alot of people are anti-microsoft here. Its fast to develop applications with and thats what most companies want now days. Can anyone tell me the true advantages of using another language over visual basic?

I was making a joke that you could use a nice thick old VB book to keep a door open.