Something I’ve been wanting to do for a while is learn a programming language, other then PHP (if that’s classed as one). I’d tried Java, yes it has cross-platformability, but it is too complex for my mind, I wanted something that was relatively easy, and that’s how I ended up at visual basic. A while ago I’d tried VB6, don’t know why since I had a copy of 2005 Express, and now I have started using 2005. There are a few differences between the 2, but to be honest I didn’t really learn anything from VB6 so it wasn’t much of a schock anyway.
In terms of ease of use it is great, the UI designer work’s very well, and let’s you see exactly what the final thing will look like (ok, you don’t get Aero, but it’s no big thing). And the actual programming behing it is aided by the tips that come up as you are typing, so you can start off with a knowledge of pretty much nothing!
I have created a couple of App’s with it, both the standard thing’s just for a learning curve, although am currently working on a client for StuffAtSchool.com, but more on that another time!
Although something I don’t like about it, and probably will never be changed, is the fact that it only works with Windows, which in the narrow view is fine, since most people use windows anyway, but, it is still annoying that an application the has been developed, can’t be directly exported for other OS’s, Linux in particular.
So In conclusion if you are looking to start programming, and don’t mind going windows-only I’d reccomend Visual Basic, best of all it is available as a free download from Microsoft (A little oxymoron in there) from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/default.aspx.
VB6 is actually the only programming language I’ve ever been properly proficient in – I haven’t used it for about 3 years, though.
One thing I think they changed in VB 2005 is the easy, simple, printing. In vb6 you could go
printer.print = “Text to be printed”
(or similar), and it would print on the default printer. I always thought that was brilliantly simple.
I’ve done a reasonable bit of VB 2005 myself actually and it’s a pretty nice language as languages go.
If you do want to build cross-platform applications with .NET though, learn C#. You can’t use GUIs you build in Visual Studio on both platforms, but with a bit of trickery you can make GUI apps for both Windows and Linux with Mono and GTK#. I haven’t tried this myself, though, so I can’t say how easy it is to do.
While I’m on the subject, I have to say that from my little bit of playing around with Objective-C and Cocoa on the Mac, that is a very fine environment too. Unfortuantely it suffers from the same single platform issue as VB.
VB6 was a nice, cute programming language which cut out the complexities in which Java, C, Python etc… all have. Click, draw, program. That is why I like VB.
However I have not sampled the new edition of VB, mainly due to last time I researched it there was a great lack of resources available. VB6 seemed to have much more documentation.