Advantages of Visual Basic

There is quite a number of reasons for the enormous success of Visual Basic (VB):

• The structure of the Basic programming language is very simple, particularly as to the executable code.
  
• VB is not only a language but primarily an integrated, interactive development environment ("IDE").
  
• The VB-IDE has been highly optimized to support rapid application development ("RAD"). It is particularly easy to develop graphical user interfaces and to connect them to handler functions provided by the application.
  
• The graphical user interface of the VB-IDE provides intuitively appealing views for the management of the program structure in the large and the various types of entities (classes, modules, procedures, forms, ...).
  
• VB provides a comprehensive interactive and context-sensitive online help system.
  
• When editing program texts the "IntelliSense" technology informs you in a little popup window about the types of constructs that may be entered at the current cursor location.
  
• VB is a component integration language which is attuned to Microsoft's Component Object Model ("COM").
  
• COM components can be written in different languages and then inegrated using VB.
  
• Interfaces of COM components can be easily called remotely via Distributed COM ("DCOM"), which makes it easy to construct distributed applications.
  
• COM components can be embedded in / linked to your application's user interface and also in/to stored documents (Object Linking and Embedding "OLE", "Compound Documents").
  
• There is a wealth of readily available COM components for many different purposes.

Nevertheless, we are convinced that there remain many problems that have not been addressed at all by Java, VB, and other languages or that havn't found a really satisfactory solution so far.