Visual Basic perhaps the name itself is a popular term in the history
of computer programming languages. Many people still does not know
the actual power of Visual Basic, may be thinking that it is a wasteful
language or something like that.
But, being simple to understand, visual basic is a powerful high level
language of all times. One can develop from a simple program to a
very complex program using this language. Many have got an impression
that; program written in visual basic is in between simple and moderate.
But, one can still create a very complex program and execute it in
a normal way itself. Only the change, it is the language syntax, which
matters most. The relatively complex things were simplified with easily
understandable statements which make a program easily understandable
by even a beginner himself.
This perhaps made the language so popular. With the blend of OOP’s
the language allowed many amazing things to make it a perfect language
for development of programs in Windows platform. Although it was not
a big hit during first three versions of development, visual basic
started getting overwhelming response for version 4 onwards and the
last version 6.0 became a super hit. It is still in use and will continue
to be the most stable version for many years to come, even though
Microsoft has stopped selling it.
Most applications developed using visual basic involves inventory
systems, billing applications for various shops, hotels, commercial
establishments. Although visual basic is not suited to develop system
level programs, it can be made to interact with the windows API calls.
This enables one to implement functionalities of system level programs
in a window based application. Some of the API functions interact
with multimedia and can be made to produce a program like windows
media player. In Visual Basic, one can also develop games although
today’s games are made using technologies such as DirectX, Flash,
Quick Time, Silver Light, and so on. However, it will be without more
complex graphics and animations.
Visual Basic is used in Word, Excel applications. One can import or
export data from/to word, excel to visual basic or vice versa through
a program which is developed in visual basic. Most of the language
functionalities and syntax are being imported and used by Active Server
Pages (ASP) and ASP.net, which are used for developing dynamic web
pages.
So, from learning point of view, if you know visual basic to some
extent, then it is easy for you to learn ASP and ASP.net.