I missed Visual Basic’s 20th birthday this weekend. I remember I started using it around VB 3.0 than took some time off until a few years ago. Nice to see it is still relevant today! From BASIC on the old C64 to DOS and GWBASIC then to Visual Basic, I had a good experience with it. I’ve moved to C++ and Visual C++ a bit more lately, though.

You might ask after two-decades how VB can keep re-inventing itself to face modern and future challenges. The answer is quite literally that – re-inventing itself. OK, more accurately re-writing itself. The VB compiler is being re-written from the ground up in Visual Basic and its syntactic and semantic analysis services exposed through a managed API that exposes parse trees, expression binding, assembly production (and more) to enable a world of new scenarios including REPL, VB as a scripting language, and more. It’s all very exciting! As a VB user for … half my lifetime, now, it’s great to look back and be proud of where VB has been, happy with where it is, and especially excited about where it’s going!