Description:
Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 is the single fastest way to develop applications for any of the modern Microsoft Windows environments, period. This is the world's best-known Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment, quite stable at this point in its long career. By making extensive use of drag-and-drop component assembly, boilerplate wizards, form-based graphical user interface (GUI) design, and dozens of less obvious laborsaving features, this Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is almost certainly the fastest way to get your custom Windows software off the design team's whiteboard and into operation. True, you can use C++ (written in Microsoft Visual C++ or some other environment) to write programs that execute faster. You can use Visual J++ or a Java IDE if you like that style of object-oriented programming. But there's little debate that Visual Basic offers the best balance of feature richness, ease of use, and performance. Furthermore, if you have a bit of familiarity with fundamental programming concepts (you know something about control structures, have a handle on data structures, and have some idea of what object orientation is all about), you'll find that Visual Basic has a relatively flat learning curve. It rewards experimentation, and plenty of fine documentation exists. Visual Basic supports all of Microsoft's solutions for database access, distributed computing, componentized software, and half a dozen other major software applications. You can use Visual Basic to write Component Object Model (COM) objects, ActiveX Controls, ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) for database access, and WebClasses to provide customized responses to events that occur during Web sessions. The professional edition supplements the standard Visual Basic features with visual tools for creating database schema on Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases. The Professional Edition also integrates with Microsoft Visual SourceSafe and the rest of Microsoft's tools for development of software by teams. --David Wall
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