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Event Driven Programming

Click here to Use sizing
move object handles to
resize object

Figure 1.9: Command Button.

Form Designers and Code Windows
The last parts of the IDE that we will take a look at in our overview are form designers and code
windows, which appear in the center of Figure 1.9. (The form designer displays the current form
under design, complete with command button, and the code window displays the code for the
Command1_Click() procedure.)

Success Story of Visual Basic
The History of Visual Basic dates back to 1991 when VB 1.0 was introduced. The core of Visual
Basic was built on the older BASIC language, which was a popular programming language
throughout the 1980s.

Alan Cooper had developed a drag-and-drop interface in the late 1980s, Microsoft approached
him and asked his company, Tripod, to develop the concept into a form building application.
Tripod developed the project for Microsoft. It was called Ruby and it did not include a
programming language at all. Microsoft decided to bundle it with the BASIC programming
language, creating Visual Basic. Ruby also provided the ability to load dynamic link libraries
containing additional controls (then called ‘gizmos’), which later became the VBX interface.
Visual Basic 1.0 for Windows was released in May 1991 at a trade show in Atlanta and
Georgia. Visual Basic 2.0 was released in November 1992. The programming environment
was easier to use, and its speed was improved. Notably, forms became core objects, thus
laying the foundational concepts of class modules as were later offered in VB4.
Visual Basic 3.0 was released in 1993 and came in Standard and Professional versions. VB3
included version 1.1 of the Microsoft Jet Database Engine that could read and write Jet (or
Access) 1.x databases. Visual Basic 4.0 was released in August 1995. It was the first version
that could create 32-bit as well as 16-bit Windows programs. It also introduced the ability to

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