Visual Basic

Basic has been around for some time now, although Microsoft has clearly captured the market with one of the most popular languages for development of business applications. It is the most widely used language in the world because often it is easier for beginners to learn and use. One of the problems with Visual Basic has been its lack of support for heavy-duty multimedia work, although this problem has quickly disappeared with many third-party 3D engines and tools written exclusively for the VB programmer. Also, DirectX has had support for VB since Version 7.

Visual Basic’s strength lies in its ease of use. It is nearly impossible to write an application in C or C++ and do it as quickly as you can in VB. Most of its users are corporate programmers developing databases with VB on a daily basis. However, because it is the most popular language in the world, it was only a matter of time before support was available for multimedia and games. During the past several years, third parties have released countless ActiveX controls and add-ons that allow VB programmers to take advantage of DirectX and OpenGL. The controls allow VB programmers to do things they had only wished for. Now that Microsoft is supporting VB with DirectX, the language is becoming more popular for game programmers, and with the impending .NET release, it appears VB is poised to become a serious contender for game developers.