Its ease of programming fell apart in large, complex applications, and developers had to trouble themselves with arcane COM concepts like apartment threading. NET was released, VB was already losing ground. Further, Microsoft has lost its hold over business application development, with. Usage dropped, and today VB.NET is a poor cousin to C#, which dominates. NET features such as full object orientation were not wanted by VB developers. Although the language was similar, there was no migration path, and new. In many ways, we’ve spent the last 25 years chasing the ideas that it got pretty right.” Visual Basic 6.0, the stuff of dreams – or nightmares?Īccording to Lucas, Microsoft made an “unforced error” when it released VB.NET in 2002.

Lucas interviewed Alan Cooper, as well as Micheal Geary from the original Microsoft VB team, and describes assembling the history as a “labor-of-love project.” He adds: “I think we lost something when we lost Visual Basic.

At its peak, Visual Basic had nearly 3.5 million developers worldwide, more than ten times the number of C++ programmers.” Lucas writes: “By the time Visual Basic 6.0 was released in 1998, its dominance was absolute: two-thirds of all business application programming on Windows PCs was done in Visual Basic. Nevertheless, it was the beginning of a programming model that became hugely popular, and the significance of VB both for Windows and for software development in general is hard to overstate. “The final product horrified Cooper, who loathed BASIC,” Lucas writes. Instead, the project which was then codenamed Thunder, became a Business Language project and was shipped in 1991 as a version of BASIC. This did not happen though, for reasons that are not clear but might include politics over OS/2, which was supposedly going to replace Windows, or conflict with the team building Windows itself. The project was shown to Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who agreed to bundle it with the upcoming Windows 3.0. The prototype was called Tripod, and allowed drag and drop of objects like buttons and listboxes onto a design surface.Īccording to the post by Lucas, the naming of these design objects changed over time, from “waldos” to “gizmos” to “controls.” This was in 1987, when Windows was winning users but writing applications for the operating system was hard.

Developer Alan Cooper first conceived Microsoft’s Visual Basic (VB) as a “shell construction kit,” according to a new history written by Retool head of design Ryan Lucas.

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