Talk:Visual Basic (classic)

Support in Windows 8
Hi folks - my first ever Wikipedia entry! Happy to be on board. Added brief info (w source) about Windows8 support for VB6. Also added a link to an article about same. Appreciate feedback if anything was inappropriate. Apollograce (talk) 23:45, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

The article says under Timeline that "Windows 7 no longer support[s] the Visual Basic 6.0 development environment, but still support[s] the runtime. ...they support the runtime in Windows 8." Windows 7 has always supported the VB6 development environment ("IDE") and so does Windows 8.0 and 8.1, although installation in Win8 is somewhat quirky. It has also been reported that VB6's IDE runs in the beta versions of Windows 10. So I am updating the article. A 3-monitor screen shot showing the Win8.1 Metro interface, a VB6 program, and the VB6 IDE can be seen at http://www.aeyec.com/vb6_in_Win81_5760x1080.jpg. 173.216.178.98 (talk) 13:04, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

I just visited this site to see if anyone is still using VB6 and was surprised to see the 3-monitor screen shot from my site linked above (which is fine by me). I've been using VB6 with Win10 all this time without any problems. Nfordwkp (talk) 01:24, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Code Notation
VB used Hungarian notation, why is it not used in the code examples?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation — Preceding unsigned comment added by 180.149.192.133 (talk) 22:12, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Original design
The first paragraph currently says that BASIC is a user-friendly programming language designed for beginners but the article about BASIC does not say that. The B in BASIC is beginners. All of that is in the article about BASIC so I will remove the extraneous comment about the original design of BASIC. Sam Tomato (talk) 16:11, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't understand your objection here. Could you clarify a bit? -- SarekOfVulcan (talk) 16:23, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't know how to make it more clear. This article is about Visual BASIC, not BASIC. The BASIC language is described in a different article. That article describes the circumstances of the original design of BASIC. Sam Tomato (talk) 16:35, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Also the part that says Visual BASIC is event-driven is questionable. VB 6 does not support callbacks to process Windows messages; that is why it has DoEvents. So its event-driven features are limited. Sam Tomato (talk) 16:40, 5 April 2018 (UTC) In "Language features" this article currently says that VB provides "basic support for object-oriented programming" but that is not true. It might provide some OOP support but not basic in the sense of a complete useful support. It also says "avoiding the problem of memory leaks common to other languages" but memory leaks are not common in other languages; I will fix that comment. It also says "The Visual Basic compiler is shared with other Visual Studio languages (C, C++)" and I doubt that is true; that statement needs an authority and if true then it needs clarification. Sam Tomato (talk) 17:20, 5 April 2018 (UTC)


 * 'Event Driven' is or was the conventional description for VB. If you want to argue for a different description, you should probably define what you think 'Event Driven' means now. User-defined callbacks to process Windows messages are only required where VB does not already define hooks to process Windows messages (like mouse clicks).
 * But anyway, VB6 does support callbacks to process Windows messages. I think VB3 did too (it was possible to write a normal windows-message-loop program in VB3, if you were masochistic)
 * Memory leaks were certainly common in other languages, which is part of why modern languages like Java and C# are memory managed like VB was.
 * The VB6 compiler back end was shared with the rest of Visual Studio, including VC++. It is possible, for example, to redirect the command string and direct the compiler/linker to emit a DLL instead of an EXE. This was probably not true for VB5, but then I know very little about MSVC before VS6. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.206.162.148 (talk) 08:45, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

Enterprise VB6
Having often heard incorrect remarks from uninformed people about the nature of VB6, ranging from "it's interpreted" to all manner of supposed failings, I wanted to add a note about deep enterprise usage. Unfortunately, although I have first-hand experience, I cannot find an acceptable citation for Wikipedia. By "enterprise", I am referring to the depth of its application, including access to Win32 APIs, hooking, shared memory, threading (apartment model), and distributed servers using MSMQ -- all of which I have been heavily involved in. The production of the VB6 product was very clever considering the previous history of the language, and also very polished. When VB.Net appeared, Microsoft ignored this particular company (despite its Gold Partner status) because they knew the language conversion tools would be useless. Trying to transition gradually by mixing VB6 and VB.Net was problematic and the company eventually folded. TonyP (talk) 09:01, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Visual Basic .NET which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 18:32, 25 April 2021 (UTC)