Visual Basic Development

Visual Basic Development Is On Its Way Out

Visual Basic (VB) has been one of the biggest success stories in programming and development languages in recent years. Created by Microsoft and based on the much-used Basic programming language, VB offered even those with out training in software engineering the tools to develop world-class applications. One of the strengths of Visual Basic development was a highly graphic approach to building GUIs, where developers could essentially drag and drop screen elements and components from a palette onto a form representing the application they were building, dramatically reducing the amount of hard code that needed be written as well as the time and cost involved in developing applications. While the program has been enormously popular, Microsoft has announced its intentions to discontinue production and support of the language and IDE, in order to move developers to its .NET platform. Many developers, having worked in this environment for years, are seeking an alternative to Visual Basic development in Progress OpenEdge.

Progress® OpenEdge® Offers Alternative to Visual Basic Development

Progress OpenEdge is a highly flexible and exceptionally reliable integrated business application platform that allows enterprises to efficiently develop, deploy, integrate and manage business-critical applications. The OpenEdge development environment provides a robust alternative to Visual Basic, delivering greater productivity through a powerful architecture designed to develop and reuse business logic. OpenEdge eliminates many coding tasks normally involved in developing business components, managing data access and building effective services. In OpenEdge's unified environment, developers can handle all the tasks associated with building the modern business application, from developing Web-based applications, distributed applications, client-server applications, integrating XML, creating Java-based messaging, integrating Web services, .Net and Java clients, and more. Clearly, OpenEdge offers the developer greater functionality than Visual Basic development.

Development with Progress Offers Superior Benefits to Visual Basic .NET

OpenEdge provides several critical components that make it a more powerful development environment than Visual Basic:

• OpenEdge offers ABL, an advanced business programming language that is targeted at making developers highly productive in building data driven business applications. With an editor, compiler, data dictionary and data administration utilities, ABL is supported on UNIX and Linux platforms, and includes interfaces to the key industry standards like XML and Web services.
• OpenEdge® Architect is an Eclipse-based environment that provides high productivity tools to minimize complexity and automate many programming tasks
• Isolates developers from the complexity of the underlying technologies, so VB 6 developers don't need to learn the .NET framework

Progress Software also delivers solutions for service oriented architectures and the solutions architect, application infrastructure software, and SOA responsiveness.

Learn more about Progress OpenEdge as an alternative to Visual Basic development