Installing Visual Basic
Before we start the programming goodness you first need Visual Basic installed on your computer. Visual Basic comes in a number of flavours, Visual Basic for Applications, VBScript, Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier and Visual Basic .NET.
These tutorials deal exclusively with Visual Basic .NET. You can follow the tutorials with any flavour of Visual Basic but the code samples will only work with Visual Basic .NET. If you have Visual Basic .NET installed on your machine already you can go to the next page.
If you haven’t got Visual Basic .NET on your pc you have a couple of choices to make. You can either:
- pay for it
- get it for free
If you pay for it you’ll get the full Visual Studio, a professional package for teams of software developers. This tutorial was developed using the free version, called Visual Studio Express. It’s a fully featured software development environment which, in my own humblest, provides a great introduction to the language and is used by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide. If you still want to pay for it, get in contact, I have a couple of other ideas to help you spend your money J
Visual Studio Express is, at the time of writing, up to version 2012. I developed using Visual Studio Express 2010 which doesn’t provide support for Windows 8 Metro style interfaces. But does anyone have Windows 8? J
Visual Studio Express 2012 is split by the type of application you want to develop. We will be developing predominantly desktop applications. Visual Studio 20102 Express for Windows Desktop can be downloaded here.
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads#d-express-windows-desktop
In addition, we will develop a web application. Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web applications can be downloaded and installed from here
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads#d-express-web
Visual Studio Express 2010 is split by the language. Obviously, or I hope it’s obvious by now, we will be developing in Visual Basic. Click the link below, install Visual Basic 2010 Express and you will be able to develop desktop and web applications.
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng#products/visual-studio-2010-express
And now, you’re good to go!