Why Visual Basic Dominated Windows Development and How It Fell From Grace

History of Visual Basic

Visual Basic (VB) left the software developer scene over twenty years ago, but its early impact was revolutionary, offering an intuitive, drag‑and‑drop IDE that made Windows application development accessible.

In 1987, when Windows was popular yet difficult to program for, Microsoft employee Alan Cooper led a project that allowed UI components such as buttons and list boxes to be placed on a design surface, described as a “shell construction toolkit.”

The project, initially codenamed “Thunder,” evolved through several name changes—“waldos,” “gizmos,” and finally “controls”—and was shown to then‑CEO Bill Gates, who approved bundling it with the upcoming Windows 3.0, though implementation was delayed, possibly due to OS/2 considerations.

In 1991 the first version, Visual Basic 1.0, was released, drawing inspiration from Cooper’s Beta Generator. The language combined a Ruby‑coded visual component layer with an embedded BASIC engine originally built for Microsoft’s discontinued “Omega” database.

Subsequent releases added significant features: Visual Basic 5.0 (1997) introduced 32‑bit Windows compatibility, custom user controls, and the ability to compile native code; Visual Basic 6.0 (1998) added web‑application capabilities. At its peak, VB powered two‑thirds of commercial Windows applications and boasted roughly 3.5 million developers, ten times more than C++.

When Microsoft launched VB.NET in 2002, the transition lacked migration tools and forced developers to adopt .NET’s object‑oriented model, leading to a rapid decline in VB usage. .NET became the dominant platform, and VB.NET remained a minor cousin of C#.

Other tools such as Delphi emerged, offering stronger performance and native code compilation, influencing later languages like C# and TypeScript. Microsoft continues to support VB for Office macros, but the original simplicity and productivity of classic VB have not been fully recaptured.

Reference: https://devclass.com/2023/03/20/microsofts-visual-basic-why-it-won-and-why-it-had-to-die/