Using Visual Basic in Technical Applications

Visual Basic is the best software programming language for developing technical applications, and it is the easiest one to learn. Sure, you can also use it to design fancy Internet sites, business applications, the most advanced database systems, and distributed transactions. For industrial and technical applications, however, Visual Basic is better than anything else. In this article I will try presenting few of the reasons behind my affirmations.

First of all, Visual Basic comes with an exceptional graphic interface, which is definitely the easiest one to work with. For those who know how to do it, Visual Basic does everything Visual C++ does, only ten to twenty times faster and easier. It takes just few minutes to insert a label or a red line to display the dynamic value of a technical parameter. Of course, some graphic controls are very complex, but you do not necessarily need them. The most important controls in technical applications are: labels, text-boxes, buttons, MSFlexGrid, then lines, rectangles and circles. This is all! You do not need fancy graphics. Using only the few basic controls I summarized you can design the most powerful technical applications today, in the entire World.

When we control hardware the most important is to process data as bytes and bits. In C and C++ we use pointers to break integers into bytes, or to concatenate bytes into integers and doubles. In Visual Basic we use mathematical operations on bytes, and results are exactly the same. In order to process individual bits we use