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Visual Basic 6.0 programming for beginners!

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Today we will start our study of Microsoft Visual Basic projects through a number of sample assignments and described source code to master the fine points of using the VB language in a commercial environment ...

Visitors from all over the world!

¡Bienvenido! Bienvenue! Willkommen! Howdy, Mate!

First of all, let me say Hello! to my many, many, loyal students particularly in India, the Philippines and Malaysia. Over the years you have proven to be among the best consumers or my VB tutorials and I appreciate it. My statistics tell me that on the other side of the world from here (here being Canada) students and programmers in technical colleges and software training centres are studying my courses and that makes me glad. I'll really try to do as much as I can for you.

Now, I just want to apologize that the tone of most of the references and lessons is so North-American. I would love to give you examples, samples and situations based on your cultural norms but the truth is that I don't know enough about them, yet. For example, I have absolutely no idea how a cricket game is played!

In my defense, picture to yourself, if you can, that as I write this I see outside my window that there is a metre of fresh snow on the ground and the temperature is a windy -12^o C. The only subject of discussion by sports fans is yesterday's hockey game (ice hockey, that is).

However, as a French-Canadian I do have a few things in common with you in that I am not an American either and I too have to get by with English as a second language.

If you have suggestions that would make the tutorials more interesting, please do not hesitate to pass them along.

About the Visual Basic 6 tutorial

What kind of programming project do you have in mind?

Do you intend to launch a million-dollar business on the Internet?

Maybe just a simple dating service?

Or do you just want to get your hands on that college degree and then head-out into the urban jungle?

I'll tell you a secret - in all those cases, computer programming skills will really help! You don't really have to be a geek to be in computers. But since you're here and reading this, I guess you know that already.

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Whether you're a beginner at the programming game or a programmer who as some experience with other languages, you'll find that Visual Basic 6 is just about the best way to start getting the right training with the objects approach to programming.

Microsoft boasts that there are 3.2 million users of Visual Basic 6 in the world. Sometimes it seems that at least half of them have written a book, a magazine or a tutorial on the subject. The amount of information available is overwhelming. The problem is that everything you need to know is there, somewhere, but when you're just a beginner you can't even know where to begin to look. So, why another tutorial?

Well, this Visual Basic tutorial is different. For one thing it's meant for the real beginner - the one who doesn't know his Form from a hole in the ground. It covers all the basics to get you programming a real application and sets you on the road to bigger and better things. And it has lots of easy to follow examples, sample projects and Visual Basic 6 source code that you can evaluate and adapt to your own needs. Also, it's organized like a textbook, not a reference manual. You do not have to know what you're looking for in order to find it. If you follow the lessons, in order, you go through all the fundamentals required to start producing real code.

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About VISUAL BASIC 6

Visual Basic 6 is not your grandfather's BASIC! If your knowledge of programming is limited to the QBASIC you toyed with in high school, you'll think you've landed on a different planet. You may still see the occasional GoTo hanging around but, for the most part you will be in unfamiliar territory. For one thing, the word Basic in Visual Basic is not an acronym anymore. It used to be. When the language was invented in the early 70's, BASIC stood for Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, thus the acronym (word formed from the first letter of several words, in upper-case). It is certainly not just for beginners, and although it is quite versatile, I don't know if I'd call it exactly All-purpose. And while it is still Instruction Code, it is more than Symbolic now. But THE big difference is the Visual aspect of it where you work with windows and icons and pictures and multimedia.
It really is a lot of fun!

Before you start developing a Visual Basic 6 application you should be aware that some programming knowledge is useful. If you have used BASIC or Pascal or C before you got here, that's OK. If you did learn one of those languages, you were working in a procedural fashion: when you type RUN the program starts at the beginning and basically follows the instructions going down the list, skipping here and there according to control instructions until it finds some kind of END statement. That is not how Visual Basic operates. Rather than procedural it is event-driven. There will be more on that subject in the next lesson.

However, you do have to write Visual basic 6 code to program the events - there are loops and conditions and arrays. We will not be covering the fundamentals of programming as such - you should be familiar with the basic constructs such as the IF...THEN...ELSE or the FOR...NEXT statements.

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Even if it's just for a hobby, you'll be amazed at what you didn't know you could do!

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About Visual Basic versions

You may be aware that there are several dialects of the Visual Basic language in use. This tutorial is on standard Visual Basic. It uses the VB IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to let you create standalone Visual Basic applications that can be distributed as .EXE files. Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is the language used to tie Microsoft Office products together. It links Word and Excel applications, for example. Although it is very similar to standard VB, it does have several particular techniques that must be learned on their own. VBScript is a small subset of Visual Basic, with limited instructions, mostly used in Internet applications.

As for version, this tutorial is based upon Visual Basic 6.0. You may have access to version 4 or 5 in your environment. Don't worry about it. Of course Mr. Gates would like us to rush out to the store and buy the latest release as soon as it hits the shelves but we are not all as, shall we say, fortunate, as Mr. Gates when it comes to spending money. Right now, when a new version is announced, most of the improvements cover Internet access or Class libraries, etc. At this level of training, we will not be using most of those facilities and so, one version is just about as good as another. A form is a form and a button is a button. There may be slight differences in the interface between versions but those will not matter much.

The only problems occur when you try to run an application on a lower version of the software. It normally doesn't work. But the hardest part of creating an application is usually in writing the code. Some scripts can run into the 100's of line. Fortunately the script is just text and you can work around the version problem with Cut and Paste operations. You will have to redraw the forms, buttons and so on but, that is a minor inconvenience when you can paste in the code for all those objects.

In order to be as accessible as possible, the code downloads at the end of the tutorial will all be in the form of text files that can be pasted into any version of VB.

Visual Basic .NET is now available. Although very similar in most ways to Visual Basic 6, Visual Basic .NET does have significant differences in its approach. For one thing, VB .NET is now completely object-oriented, which isn't the case with Visual Basic 6. An application that runs well in VB 6 will have to be converted, using a conversion wizard to run on VB .NET. Microsoft tell us that the conversion wizard will convert 95% of the code (an optimistic estimate?). Regardless, that leaves at least 5% that will have to be converted manually. That means that a lot of people will wait to see further improvements before jumping to the new version. And add to that the fact that Visual Studio .NET, the parent framework for VB has a huge infrastructure. It requires lots of system resources. For example, you need at least 128 meg of RAM. Excuse me! When I look at the real world I see thousands upon thousands of perfectly good computers with less than 128 meg of memory.

Before too long we'll be doing a tutorial on "Converting Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic .NET" and eventually we will convert this tutorial to VB .NET also.

Here's your lead to a great new Visual Basic training site!
If you need more information and examples of VB 6 in action, you might want to visit this site for
Free VB 6 tutorials and sample source code samples.

However, if you are just getting into programming or into VB, the basic stuff doesn't change. You still need to know how to create a form, how to put controls on a form, how to write a loop or a decision structure. That hasn't changed in ages and that you can still learn with Visual Basic 6. I see installations out in the real world still doing tons of interesting work with versions 4 or 5 of Visual Basic!

All about food and wine ...

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For all kinds of useful info: The Ultimate fine wine and food pairing guide.

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Ciao!

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Visual Basic 6.0 Tutorial Content

Lesson 1

The Visual Basic 6 environment
Defining terms
Creating a Visual Basic Project
Practice project - Building a Football Scoreboard

Lesson 1b

Improving the VB application
Using a step-by-step approach
Writing a VB procedure
Calling procedures

Lesson 2

Using the Visual Basic 6 code editor
Adhering to programming standards
Data types, variables and constants in Visual Basic
Using operators
Control structures - IF...THEN, Select Case, DO...LOOP, FOR...NEXT
Practice assignment - Upgrading the Scoreboard

Lesson 3

Designing the Visual Basic Application
Working with users
Guiding principles
Choosing a Visual Basic interface style

Lesson 4

Defining the Visual Basic Form
Standard controls: Picture, Frame, CommandButton, Label, TextBox, CheckBox, etc.
Visual Basic practice assignment: Creating a Payroll Form