From our perspective there are two distinct uses of Microsoft's Visual Basic language:
- to provide functionality behind applications built using Microsoft Office products;
- as the "glue" for system integration on the Windows platform.
Our sheet size selection model is an instance of an application built using a Microsoft Office product, in this case Excel. As far as the user is concerned, it is just a clever spreadsheet: the user specifies the data and presses a button on a special toolbar. The spreadsheet then works out a series of solutions and presents the results both numerically and graphically. This use of Visual Basic seems destined to continue.
Visual Basic has been pre-eminent for system integration on the Windows platform because it has required much less code to be written to achieve a given result than other languages. With Microsoft's .NET platform there are now two languages which provide efficient access to Windows resources: VB.NET and C#. C# is the native language for the .NET platform and VB.NET is really a VB-like dialect of C#. As some of the capabilities of C# have been restricted in order to make VB.NET as similar to Visual Basic as possible, C# appears to be a better choice than VB.NET for new projects.
