The BASIC programming language (originally invented at Dartmouth College in 1964) and Microsoft share a long history together. Microsoft basically started their business with the licensing of their BASIC interpreter (Altair BASIC), initially developed by Paul Allan and Bill Gates. Various dialects of Microsoft’s BASIC implementation were installed in the ROMs of many home computers like the Apple II (Applesoft BASIC) or the Commodore 64 (Commodore BASIC) during the 1970s and 1980s. A whole generation of programmers discovered their interest for computer programming through BASIC before moving on to greater knowledge.
BASIC was also shipped with Microsoft’s successful disk operating system (MS-DOS) for the IBM PC and compatibles. Early versions were BASICA and GW-BASIC. Original BASIC code was based on line numbers and typically lots of GOTO statements, resulting in what was often referred to as “spaghetti code”. Starting with MS-DOS 5.0 GW-BASIC was replaced by QBasic (a stripped down version of Microsoft QuickBasic). It was backwards compatible to GW-BASIC and introduced structured programming. Line numbers and GOTOs were no longer necessary.
When Windows became popular Microsoft introduced Visual Basic, which included a form designer for easy creation of GUI applications. They even released one version of Visual Basic for DOS, which allowed the creation of GUI-like textual user interfaces.
Visual Basic.NET
The current generation of Microsoft’s Basic is Visual Basic.NET. It’s the .NET based successor to Visual Basic 6.0, which is nowadays known as “Visual Basic Classic”.
Feature-wise VB.NET is mostly equivalent to C#, including full support for object-oriented programming, interfaces, generics, lambdas, operator overloading, custom value types, extension methods, LINQ and access to the full functionality of the .NET framework. The differences are mostly at the syntax level. It has almost nothing in common with the original BASIC anymore.
Updated Cheat Sheet for Java developers
A couple of years ago we published a VB.NET cheat sheet for Java developers on this blog. The cheat sheet uses Java as the reference language, because today Java is a lingua franca that is understood by most contemporary programmers. Now we present an updated version of this cheat sheet, which takes into account recent developments like Java 8:
Schneide Blog 