Before we begin Visual Basic 6 programming, let us understand some basic concepts of programming. According to Webopedia, a computer program is an organized list of instructions that, when executed, causes the computer to behave in a predetermined manner. Without programs, computers are useless. Therefore, programming means designing or creating a set of instructions to ask the computer to carry out certain jobs which normally are very much faster than human beings can do.
Most people think that computer CPU is a very intelligent thing, which in actual fact it is a dumb and inanimate object that can do nothing without human assistant. The microchips of a CPU can only understand two distinct electrical states, namely, the on and off states, or 0 and 1 codes in the binary system. So, the CPU only understands a combinations of 0 and 1 codes, a language which we called machine language. Machine language is extremely difficult to learn and it is not for us laymen to master it easily. Fortunately , we have many smart programmers who wrote interpreters and compilers that can translate human language-like programs such as BASIC into machine language so that the computer can carry out the instructions entered by the users. Machine language is known as the primitive language while Interpreters and compilers like Visual Basic are called high-level language. Some of the high level programming languages beside Visual Basic are Fortran, Cobol, Java, C, C++, Turbo Pascal, and more. Among the aforementioned programming languages, Visual Basic is the most popular. Not only it is easily to learn because of its English-like syntaxes, it can also be Incorporated into all the Microsoft office applications such as Microsoft words, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and more. Visual Basic for applications is known as VBA. If you wish to know more about VBA, please visit our tutorial at: Excel VBA Tutorial
1.2 What programs can you create with Visual Basic 6?
With VB 6, you can create any program depending on your objective. For example, you can create educational programs to teach science , mathematics, language, history , geography and so on. You can also create financial and accounting programs to make you a more efficient accountant or financial controller. For those of you who like games, you can create those programs as well. Indeed, there is no limit to what program you can create ! There are many such programs in this tutorial, so you must spend more time on the tutorial in order to learn how to create those programs. If you wish to view some of the sample programs, you can take a look at the link below:
VB Sample Programs
1.3 The Visual Basic 6 Integrated Development Environment
Before you can program in VB 6, you need to install Visual Basic 6 in your computer. If you do not own a copy of Visual Basic 6 software yet , you can purchase it from Amazon.com by clicking the link below:
Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Professional
Basically any present computer system should be able to run the program, be it a Intel Pentium II, Intel Pentium III, Intel Pentium IV or even AMD machines, Visual Basic 6 can run without any problem. It might not be true for VB2008, older machines might not be able to run VB2008 as it takes up much more resources, therefore I still prefer VB 6 as it is light and easy to program. It is still very useful and powerful, and I am happy to know that Microsoft Windows Vista can support VB 6. However, if you prefer to learn VB 2008, you can refer to our VB 2008 Tutorial.
On start up, Visual Basic 6.0 will display the following dialog box as shown in Figure 1.1. You can choose to either start a new project, open an existing project or select a list of recently opened programs. A project is a collection of files that make up your application. There are various types of applications that we could create, however, we shall concentrate on creating Standard EXE programs (EXE means executable program). Now, click on the Standard EXE icon to go into the actual Visual Basic 6 programming environment.
Figure 1.1
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar