Visual Basic 7 to Take on Server-Side Java

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has recently previewed the next version of Visual Basic, currently called version 7. Visual Basic (VB) is a language and environment for building Windows applications, available both as a stand-alone product and as a component of the Visual Studio development tool suite. The upcoming VB 7 will introduce new drag-and-drop tools for building Web applications and add language features to make VB programs more maintainable and scalable. It’s still a year or more away, but Microsoft is promoting it now to fill a gap in its Web development products and discourage developers from moving to Sun’s Java for Web applications.

Visual Basic: Desktop Present, Web Future

Visual Basic is Microsoft’s most popular programming language—Microsoft claims it has 3.2 million developers, although this figure includes variants such as Visual Basic for Applications (Office’s macro language) and VBScript (a scripting language for Web applications). Programmers use VB for desktop applications and for client applications that access a back-end database. VB allows developers to quickly create such applications while writing relatively little code. For example, VB developers can build database client applications by dragging and dropping text fields and tables onto a form. VB has been especially attractive to in-house corporate developers and authors of low-volume vertical applications, markets where it’s important to get applications working quickly.