Visual Basic is a programming language from Microsoft designed to make building Windows applications fast and approachable. Developers laid out a program’s window by dragging buttons, text boxes, and other controls onto a form, then wrote short pieces of code that ran in response to events such as a button click. This event-driven, drag-and-drop style let people build working graphical programs without writing large amounts of low-level Windows code.
Microsoft announced Visual Basic for Windows in 1991. Over the following years it released a series of versions, with Visual Basic 6.0 shipping in 1998 according to Microsoft’s own lifecycle documentation. “Classic” Visual Basic compiled to native code and was based on Microsoft’s Component Object Model (COM).
Visual Basic became one of the most popular programming tools of the 1990s. Its accessibility brought a large new population of developers into Windows programming, including many who were not formally trained programmers but needed to build business applications quickly.
In 2002 Microsoft released a successor, Visual Basic .NET, built on the new .NET Framework. As Microsoft’s documentation notes, the first release of Visual Basic .NET shipped with Visual Studio .NET 2002. The move to .NET was a major break from classic Visual Basic, a transition that proved difficult for the existing community.