14 DAY TRIAL // Visual Basic turned 20 this week, more precisely on May 20th, 2011. According to Anthony D. Green, program manager working on the Visual Basic (code-name "Roslyn") Compiler, it was Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates that first demonstrated VB. Green recalled the demo that Gates did at the Windows World, in Atlanta, on May 20th, 1991 as the technology has already been available for two decades.
“Twenty years later, the 10th version of this latest in an unbroken line of Microsoft BASIC languages stretching back to Microsoft’s founding is still going strong,” Green said.
Visual Basic started out back in 1987 when Alan Cooper, the director of Applications Software for Coactive Computing Corporation wrote a program dubbed Ruby, which he subsequently sold to Microsoft.
The Redmond company married Ruby with its own QuickBASIC in order to produce Visual Basic, which was released in 1991.
20 years later, “a matured language looks to the future. Visual Basic has always had a personality for humanizing programming and with Async methods in vNext it continues that tradition,” Green reveals.
For the next version of Visual Basic, which will ship with Visual Studio vNext, the successor of Visual Studio 2010, the key to evolution is reinventing itself.
With the imminent advent of Windows 8, VB needs to grow in order to let developers build next-generation projects.
“The VB compiler is being re-written from the ground up in Visual Basic and its syntactic and semantic analysis services exposed through a managed API that exposes parse trees, expression binding, assembly production (and more) to enable a world of new scenarios including REPL, VB as a scripting language, and more,” Green said.
“It’s all very exciting! As a VB user for … half my lifetime, now, it’s great to look back and be proud of where VB has been, happy with where it is, and especially excited about where it’s going!”