Visual Basic Or

[chingching]

Hi.

I'm looking for a simple program to make simple programs. Years and years ago I used ms visual basic and also Borland's paradox ?

I'm looking for any suggestions of similar programs? Is Visual Basic the way to go? I'm looking for something simple and easy to learn. I don't want to make any complex programs, just simple small desktop applications.

thanks,

[Tywais]

I believe you mean Borland's Delphi (Pascal based), unless you are wanting to do database programming (Paradox). I've used many languages over the years (professionally) and have settled into Visual Basic 6.0 and .NET. Some will probably say to go C++ but the learning curve is high and if you have previous experience in Basic, then Visual Basic would be my recommendation. You will probably also find a lot more source code available on the net for basic then for Pascal that can speed up your program development.

I've been writing control, data acquisition and data analysis software for applied physics since MS QuickBasic so am a little biased but it's necessary for me to get a GUI up and running quickly and VB does it for me. Easily extendible also with many third party addons. Sometimes I find myself doing repetitive calculations with a hand calculator and decide to slap together a VB program and in about 5 minutes have it automated.

[lingling]

Hi.

I'm looking for a simple program to make simple programs. Years and years ago I used ms visual basic and also Borland's paradox ?

I'm looking for any suggestions of similar programs? Is Visual Basic the way to go? I'm looking for something simple and easy to learn. I don't want to make any complex programs, just simple small desktop applications.

thanks,

VB.NET and C# is essentially the same thanks to the common runtime, base framework classes etc. C# has a more straightforward language syntax because it didn't have to carry the luggage of syntactic backwards compatibility. If you are starting from scratch I would recommend you to start with C#. If you want to switch from C# to VB.NET later it is very easy. VB.NET to C# is also easy, but you will then have to "unlearn" some of the odd stuff that has been carried on from previous vb versions into vb.net.

[lingling]

This is a good starting point - download Visual Studio Express for free:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/

[Wolfie]

I develop (professionally) with VB.net and ASP.net - if your familiar with VB then i would definitely recommend going that direction.

The .net framework is free and theres plenty of source code out there - a great resource to use (altho the site is a bit slow) is www.asp.net

Visual Studio is my tool of choice, but to legally own it is quite expensive, there are probably equally decent interfaces available for free, check out the link above!

[naka]

Depends what sort of applications you want to do.

If it's basically number crunching stuff or organizing then perhaps Microsoft Access.

Naka.