Happy 20th Birthday VB!

The Visual Basic Team - Happy 20th Birthday Visual Basic!

"Twenty years ago, May 20^th, 1991 at Windows World, in Atlanta, Microsoft founder Bill Gates demoed Visual Basic 1.0. Twenty years later, the 10^th version of this latest in an unbroken line of Microsoft BASIC languages stretching back to Microsoft’s founding is still going strong. When you look back over the history of a tool that’s been around that long you start to see some familiar experiences from Wetware products (commonly called children :P ): The cute and cuddly days of its youth, in the 16-bit era; the awkward teen years and the transition to .NET; sibling rivalry with the new baby (C#); and finally getting those braces … er, underscores off :). And now, finally out of those turbulent teen years, a matured language looks to the future. Visual Basic has always had a personality for humanizing programming and with Async methods in vNext it continues that tradition.

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That makes me feel old... One of my first "real" business applications was in VB 1.0 and I've released business apps into production with every version since.

Funny that every time I swear off VB and plan on C#'ing, VB just seems to drag me back into the fold (maybe that's because I still dream-code in VB... stupid brain... lol ;)

In the last couple years I thought VB was on its death watch. None of the new tools, like XNA, WP7, RDS, etc, were getting any VB support. Sure the language was evolving, but if you can't build the REALLY cool stuff, then??? Now that seems to be changing a little in that at least WP7 has native VB support and there's a rumor that XNA will soon too (E3?). And the recent (well last year'ish) language team re-org and language co-evolution direction seems to have given VB some new life. My tired old brain hopes so...

In any case, Happy Birthday VB. You're almost old enough to drink now... lol