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Visual Basic Tutorial

By James Crowley, published on 14 Jul 2001
Page 5 of 13
  1. Introduction
  2. What is VB?
  3. What can I do with it?
  4. Where can I get it?
  5. Getting Started
  6. Common Words
  7. Programming!
  8. Properties
  9. User Input
  10. Running your Project
  11. The Code Window
  12. Coding
  13. Conclusion

Getting Started

Now that you have bought your copy of Visual Basic, whatever its edition, we can take our first look at where you will be spending the next 10 years of your life! (on your PC anyway) I am going to assume that you have successfully installed your copy - this does not usually pose any problems.

Double-click on the Visual Basic icon, and after a little while you will be greeted with the New Project screen. From here, you can then create a new VB project, open an existing one, or re-load one you have recently opened. For the sake of this tutorial, select 'Standard EXE' and click Open. And there you go, your new VB application - or at least an application that displays an empty form. In VB, any dialog that a user is shown is known as a form; when you click save, and a save dialog appears, that is a form. When you type the text in a Word document, or open the options dialog, or anything else, that is a form too!

Before we start doing anything, we need to do something that anyone (with any sense!) who regularly uses Microsoft applications does - save your work! To do this, click the Save icon on the toolbar. You will then be prompted for two filenames. The first is a location for the Form. All good programmers use a 'naming convention'. This basically means that the programmer will use a standard format for all files, or controls, or anything else. Therefore, before naming the file, we want to stick to this convention. These can vary, but normally they follow these two rules:

- Use uppercase letters for the start of each word - spaces are not allowed for names when programming! Some programmers also use a _ (underscore). For example, if I wanted to name something 'my first form', it would be named My_First_Form.
- Add three letters before the name, so that you can instantly recognise what it is. When programming, you end up using an awful lot of names for different things. Naturally, because the things we are naming can be different sorts of things, we need to be able to tell what sort they are, without having to trawl through our code to find out. How do we do this? Using three meaningful letters (or sometimes one, if a programmer wants to have a really hard time coming up with different letters).

In this case we are saving a form, so three letters that are often used are frm. Consequently, as this is an example form, we put the letters 'frm' and 'Example' together, getting 'frmExample'. Enter this in the first Save As dialog, and click Save. The next dialog that appears is for saving the Project file. For projects, we normally use 'prj' as our three letters, so save this one as 'prjMy_First_App'. (In case you are wondering what App is, it is an abbreviation of Application).

Comments

  1. cairn keith
    06 Jun 2008 at 00:12

    what's "grammer" anyway? and who's needing it here?

  2. Tessa07
    13 Jun 2007 at 06:02
    Hi evry1..
    I take IT course, n we'll gonna use VB for nxt semester.1st n 2nd semester we already have C n C++,so  i hope any1 here can help me out..TQVM..


  3. asingh9
    08 Sep 2005 at 11:28

    Hi,
    I have been using Visual Basic for one year. Now, I want to switch to VB.net as it is the latest technology. I am totally confused how should I go about doing this. Could you tell me the name of a few books that are for new users. I dont even have any knowledge of ASP(I know a bit of HTML). Do I need to install IIS on my laptop to start web development ? If yes , where can I get it for free?
    Thnaks a ton!

  4. eric2358
    10 Aug 2005 at 07:35

    You may not be able to comile your code into an executable that would be portable, but your code can be copied into notepad files and kept for later use/reuse.  

  5. Tech Prep
    09 Mar 2005 at 18:16

    I am a student at a vocational school in Ohio. I made a program in VB.NET for students and I would like to know if there is any way I can make an .exe file of my program to take home with me. It isn't for reselling or anything. Just wondering, thanks.



    Jimmy Jimmy 05

  6. Deepthi
    01 Sep 2004 at 05:20
    Quote:
    [1]Posted by Deepthi on 5 Jun 2004 01:10 AM[/1]

  7. Deepthi
    05 Jun 2004 at 01:10

    Hi...


    Can anybody suggest me one reference book for VB.NET??


    Thanx
    Deepthi

  8. Deepthi
    04 Jun 2004 at 12:23

    how can i delete posted msgss here ???

  9. lsan
    09 Feb 2004 at 11:55

    Hello,


    Can someone please help meee!  I am trying to connect lotus notes database to asp.net.  Is this even possible? If it is, can someone tell me how this is done.  


    Thanks so much,
    Lsan

  10. James Crowley
    13 Jan 2004 at 14:24
    its certainly not a prerequisite - although the transition from no programming knowledge to learning VB.NET is certainly harder than the transition for an experienced VB programmer to VB.NET!

    Whether to learn VB or VB.NET depends on your reason for learning the language - at the moment, VB probably has more use in a commercial sense; VB.NET is still too new. But if you're looking to the future, then VB.NET/C# is where its at!
  11. abegbe
    10 Dec 2003 at 05:03

    Hi i'm a beginner with programming & i'd like a piece of advice on whether to learn vb or visual basic .net and i would also like to know if knowledge of vb is a prerequisite to knowing visual studio.net

  12. Vinay Shetty
    08 Nov 2003 at 07:14

    in adodc.recordsource


    In where clause use [primary key

  13. syed mudasser shah
    16 Sep 2003 at 06:45

    my name is syed mudasser from pakistan how are you all
    i like to learn vb

  14. Mike Greenman
    07 Sep 2003 at 11:33
    Excellent Article
    Many thanks to James Crowley, he has removed my fears of moving on from QB to VB.
    Does anyone else know of a good source of VB tutorials.
    Regards,
     martian.
  15. boygenius
    30 Aug 2003 at 01:27

    welcome to DF thats what we are all here for... learning and working together

  16. Tha_shrOOmy
    29 Aug 2003 at 17:25

    I just read your post about the VB for beginners and I want to thankl you about your help and love for learning VB,
    thank you alot,really you gave me the motivation that was needed to start with it.
    sorry for my english it's not perfect but you can understand me (i understand everything that you whrote)
    ok and continue like that people need your help
    thank u

  17. aliaziz
    18 Jun 2003 at 02:58
    great stuff !. i don't know how to start and your tutorial just show me that. thanks a lot.
    by the way, do u know of any vb samples for developing a meeting room booking system?
  18. dong
    13 Apr 2003 at 04:18

    i use the following code to delete records:
    while not adodc1.recordset.eof
       adodc1.recordset.delete adaffectcurrent
        adodc1.recordset.movenext
    loop
    only after 4 deletion i have always this error:
    "runtime error -2147467259(80004005);key coluymn information is insufficient or incorrect. too many rows were affected by update"
    how can i solve this error and continue my deletion process?

  19. Aaron Thompson
    05 Apr 2003 at 12:21
    Thanks Red Spikey Thing i have done a little C in the past but it didint go very far so thats why im trying VB out, was worried i got the wrong program thanks for the info ive been at this all morning
  20. Red Spikey Thing
    05 Apr 2003 at 11:39
    This is a common mistake if you have programmed in C, or one of its many variants.  What goes in thevrackets there is any parameters necessary for the sub to work.  To put the message box there, you hvae to do this:
    Code:
    private sub cmdOK_Click()
    MsgBox "Hello " & txtName.Text & "!"
    end sub


    That should work
  21. Aaron Thompson
    05 Apr 2003 at 10:45
    I messed up on this, well this is my first atempt at VB and i have to say right up till i did somthing wrong it was easy to understand and provided much information for begginers. I dont know what i did wrong but i got a compile error saying it expected a list seperator or ).

    I put MsgBox "Hello " & txtName.Text & "!" in between the () tags on the cmdOK_Click() command, it didint work but i couldnt see anywere els to put it im proberly making a compleat begginer mistake so i'll keep at it till i figure out what im doing wrong.

    Im useing Visual Basic 5.0 CCE if anyone can figure out what im doing wrong =)
  22. pmatthew
    15 Jan 2003 at 08:14

    Thanks James, for a really helpful and very well written crash course. I've been wondering about having a go with VB, and you've convinced me!!

  23. Tim Pollock
    11 Nov 2002 at 21:30
    For the vast majority of your tutorial I had learnt in school (for a school assignment I have to create a program). I did that quickly, but once I got to the challenge exercises I was challenged. I have only created uni-form projects and the idea of moving information from one form to the other was challenging.

    I have much more knowledge to add to my head, and it is because of this tutorial. Thank you once again. You have helped my greatly in my assignment.
  24. Chris Ramsay
    24 Oct 2002 at 22:05

    Thanks for your great article.  Before reading this I had no idea about VB, this has given me a head start, I will surely pass this info on to my friends who are interested in programming.


    Thanks again

  25. Drax
    03 Feb 2002 at 02:28

    Great article for someone who knows no programming, with exception of HTML. Obviously, I'm new to the world of VB. I'll be sure to spread the word, should I come across anyone else new. Great site, also.

  26. Developer Fusion Bot
    01 Jan 1999 at 00:00

    This thread is for discussions of Complete VB Beginners Tutorial.

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visual basic
James Crowley James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience ...
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