Visual Studio® 2010 and .NET 4, Six-in-one

Chapter 21. History of Visual Basic

The Visual Basic programming language has been changed a lot over the course of the past decade. However, the language dialect that developers use today with the "Visual" prefix was born when the .NET Framework was released in February 2002. The roots of the Basic language go back to 1964.

In recent years, many reports have been published about the popularity of programming languages, and Visual Basic was ranked in the top five most popular in each of them. There were years when surveys showed Visual Basic as the first or second most popular one. In the .NET platform, Visual Basic is used by about 60 percent of developers as the primary programming language.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of the Visual Basic programming language. The discussions in this chapter assume that you are familiar with the fundamental constructs of the language and that you have already used it. If you are not a Visual Basic developer, this chapter also helps to provide you with context.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• The roots of the Visual Basic language

• A brief history of the language used in the 1990s

• The main characteristic of Visual Basic.NET (7.0) introduced with .NET 1.0

• A brief overview of features in Visual Basic 2005 (8.0) and Visual Basic 2008 (9.0)

In the past, every major Visual Studio release introduced a new version of the Visual Basic and C# languages, following the main course of improvements in the .NET Framework. The same ...