Visual Basic

The language that taught the world to program Windows.

First released: 1991
Created by: Microsoft (built on Alan Cooper's form-designer prototype)
Typing: Static and strong under Option Strict; inference keeps declarations short
File extensions: .vb

What it is for

Visual Basic owns a corner of computing history no other language can claim: it made programming Windows accessible to millions of people who would never have touched C. Drag a button onto a form, double-click it, write what happens — that loop turned accountants, scientists and small businesses into software authors, and by the late 1990s VB was the most-used programming language on Earth. An enormous share of the world's internal line-of-business software still runs on it.

Modern VB is a first-class .NET language: fully compiled, statically typed under Option Strict, and sharing the same runtime, libraries and tooling as C#. What sets it apart is readability — blocks close with words like End If and End Sub rather than braces, arguments can be passed by name, and LINQ queries read closer to SQL in VB than in any other language. The dialect lives twice over: VBA, its office-automation cousin, still scripts Excel across virtually every company on the planet.

Microsoft settled VB's future in 2020: the language is stable, supported on modern .NET indefinitely, but no longer gains new features. That makes it a maintenance language by declaration — and an enduring one, because the code it needs to maintain is everywhere. For the many teams keeping decades of working VB in production, fluency remains quietly valuable long after the hype moved elsewhere.

Where it came from

Alan Cooper's drag-and-drop shell prototype, code-named Tripod and later Ruby, became the form engine Microsoft fused with its BASIC dialect to ship Visual Basic 1.0 in 1991. Event-driven GUI programming — draw the interface, then fill in the event handlers — was a genuine revolution, and through VB4, 5 and 6 the language became the default way businesses wrote Windows software.

VB.NET, released in 2002 alongside C#, rebuilt the language on the Common Language Runtime: real inheritance, structured exception handling, a common type system. The break with VB6 was sharp enough that some veterans dubbed it 'Visual Fred', but the reboot carried VB into the modern era, and 2008's VB 9 gave it LINQ with query syntax closer to SQL than C# ever adopted.

Through the 2010s VB co-evolved with C# on the Roslyn compiler platform, gaining interpolated strings, tuples and null-conditional operators. In 2020 Microsoft announced VB would remain supported across .NET releases but stop receiving new language features — a settled, stable retirement plan for a language whose installed base still measures in the billions of lines.

What it is like to type

VB types like prose: long lowercase-and-capitalized words, few braces, and whole keywords — End Sub, ElseIf, AndAlso — where other languages spend symbols. That makes for high letter density and fast, rhythmic typing, with the punctuation concentrated in parentheses (VB indexes arrays with them too), the c and $ string affixes, and the := of named arguments. Interpolation braces and LINQ query clauses carry most of the three-star difficulty.

Visual Basic

What it is for

Where it came from

What it is like to type

The tours

Official documentation

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