Today I read on the VBTeam that yesterday was Visual Basic’s 20th birthday. Yes our favorite language of all time has grown up and is now a wonderful young woman we all love and cherish, and sometimes we curse and swear.

It all started back in 1991 when Bill Gates demoed VB 1.0. Or not really since it started in 1988 with a project codenamed Ruby (no rails in sight at that time) which then joined with QuickBasic and became Visual Basic.

There was even a Visual Basic for Dos at one time, we call it a ConsoleApplication now.

Visual basic 6 saw the light in 1998. Mainstream support for VB6 ended in 2005. And extended support ended in 2008. But you can still build applications in it that work on the newest version of windows.

VB.Net or VB7 was presented to the world in 2002 with it’s sibling C#.

We like to forget VB9 because of it’s lack of good lambda support. We can however forgive it for that since it was in it’s puberty.

But now Vb is all grown up and we all love VB10.

I have written my fair share of posts about VB.Net over the years here at Lessthandot. And it still does not get the credit it deserves from the .Net crowd as you can see by the many reactions I got with my “Should I abandon VB.Net?” post.

So happy birthday VB and may you live to be a hundred.

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