Welcome  to Visual Basic tutorial! You have come to the right place to learn Visual Basic Programming.  I like to share the knowledge with you because I have intense passion on Visual Basic. I wish you could spend some time reading the tutorial so that you can really acquire the basic skills in Visual Basic programming. Happy Learning!

 Among them, I pick Visual Basic because it is the easiest to learn as it uses a language very similar to human language. It involves using words such as If, Then, Else, Goto, Select and so on, so it is very fast for any beginner to pick the language.

1.1 What is  Visual Basic ?

VISUAL BASIC is a high level programming language which was evolved from the earlier DOS version called BASIC. BASIC means Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It is a very  easy programming language to learn. The codes look a lot  like English Language. Different software companies produced different version of BASIC, such as Microsoft QBASIC, QUICKBASIC, GWBASIC ,IBM BASICA and so on. However, it seems people only use Microsoft Visual Basic today, as it is a well developed programming language and supporting resources are available everywhere.

With Visual Basic, you can program practically everything depending on your objective. For example, you can program educational software to teach science , mathematics, language, history , geography and so on. You can also program financial and accounting software to make you a more efficient accountant or financial controller. For those of you who like games, you can program that as well. Indeed, there is no limit to what you can program! There are many such program in this tutorial, so you must spend more time on the tutorial in order to benefit the most.

VISUAL BASIC is a VISUAL and  events driven Programming Language. These are the main divergence from the old BASIC. In BASIC, programming is done in a text-only environment and the program is executed sequentially. In VISUAL BASIC, programming is done in a graphical environment. In the old BASIC, you have to write program codes for each graphical object you wish to display it on screen, including its position and its color. However, In Visual Basic , you just need to drag and drop any graphical object anywhere on the form, and you can change its color any time using the properties windows.

On the other hand, because  users may click on a certain object randomly, so each object has to be programmed independently to be able to response to those actions (events). Therefore, a VISUAL BASIC Program is made up of many subprograms, each has its own program codes, and each can be executed independently and at the same time each can be linked together in one way or another.

1.2 The Visual Basic Environment

Before you can program in Visual Basic, you need to install VB6 in your computer. If you do not own  VB6 yet , you can purchase it from Amazon.com by clicking the link below:

 Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Professional

Basically any present computer systems should be able to run the program, be it a  Intel Pentium II, Intel Pentium III, Intel Pentium IV or even AMD machines, VB6 can run without any problem. It may not be true for VB2005, older machines might not be able to run VB2005 as it take up much more resources, therefore I still prefer using VB6 as it is light and easy to program. It is still very useful and powerful, and I am happy to know that Microsoft Windows Vista can support VB6.

On start up, Visual Basic 6.0  will display the following dialog box as shown in figure 1.1. You can choose to either start a new project, open an existing project or select a list of recently opened programs. A project is a collection of files that make up your application. There are various types of applications we could create, however, we shall concentrate on creating Standard EXE programs (EXE means executable program). Now, click on the Standard EXE icon to go into the actual VB programming environment.