What is a visual basic? History:
Visual Basic is a derivation of BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), which was designed in the mid-1960s by a small team of university students, so that they could program easily without much prior programming experience. BASIC was an important language for computer systems throughout the 60s to the early 90s. In '92 Visual Basic 1.0 came out for MSDOS. It featured "Drag and Drop" UI construction, allowing easy app development. Two months after the public release of VB1, VB2 came out, with a speed improvement. Until VB6, improvements were small, things like CPU compatibility and syntax were the main improvements. VB6 came out in 1998 and improved VB in many areas, mainly web application compatibility and runtime environment improvement. In 2002, Visual Basic .NET (VB7) came out (as did Visual C#). Visual Basic .NET included a differing syntax, i.e. procedure calls would now be made in brackets.
Code:
MsgBox "This is VB6 procedure calling!"
vs.
Msgbox("This is VB.NET Procedure calling!")
In 2003, Microsoft dropped the .NET from Visual Basic .NET, and started referring to it as just Visual basic, although it did still use the .NET framework.
How's it work?:
Early versions of Visual Basic compiled to P-Code, which interpreted itself at runtime in a virtual machine. This made it very slow to run and compile. VB5 and VB6 could compile to either P-Code or Native Code. VB1-6 were heavily criticized for many reasons, such as poor object-oriented programming, poor multi-threading support, poor DLL imports, and bad Windows services support. VB.NET essentially improved all the downfalls of VB6, but it came with a few downfalls, itself. VB.NET is easy to decompile as it is written to CIL instead of machine code, making programs such as .NET Reflector easy to use for decompilation.
In Summary:
Visual Basic is a programming language made for easy programming and GUI development.
Why should I use Visual Basic??
Visual Basic is easy, powerful, and great for most smaller applications!
Many commercial applications are made in Visual Basic, as it's easy to use and great to program with!
How can I publish to an .EXE?
Press F5 to debug your project, so that you can see the project on your screen. Close your project, save it, and then go to your Documents folder.
Go to your Visual Studio Folder, then to the Projects folder, and find your project.
From your project folder, go into the project file folder (it's just the folder inside). From there go to Bin and Debug, and there you will find your .EXE!
How do I make Hacks in Visual Basic?
Buy a book, read it.
Then come here and ask us how to get started.
Keep in mind this is a W.I.P., many more things will be added as I see the need for such. If you have an idea for an FAQ question, shoot me a VM/PM.