VB World

Microsoft® Visual Basic (VB) is built into & provided for free with a number of Microsoft® products. VB offers the advantage of a single programming language across multiple platforms & environments. However, each of these platforms & environments uses its own dialect of VB. These are oulined here and demonstrated with a very simple example to highlight the commonalities and differences between the VB dialects.

Please note that these examples use client-side VBScript, which is not supported by all web browsers. We suggest using Microsoft® Internet Explorer.
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Dialect

Environment

Platform

Minimum
Requirement

Execution

Features

VBScript
Windows
Client
Windows 98
Sequential top-down
  • variable name declaration
  • no variable type declaration
VBA/Excel®
Microsoft Office Excel
Client
Office 97
Event-driven, e.g. Open_Workbook
  • variable name declaration
  • variable type declaration
  • integrated with Office Excel object model
VBScript/HTML
Web Browser
Client
Internet Explorer
Sequential top-down & event-driven, e.g. OnLoad
  • as for VBScript
  • integrated with Java object model
VBScript/ASP
Web Server
Server
Windows Web Server
Sequential top-down
  • as for VBScript
  • integrated with ASP object model
VB.NET/ASPX
Web Server
Server
Windows Web Server with ASP.NET & VB.NET
Event-driven, e.g. Page_Load
  • as for VB & VBA
  • integrated with ASP.NET object model


VBScript

try it !

VBA/Excel®

try it !

VBScript/HTML

try it !

VBScript/ASP

try it !

VB.NET/ASPX

try it !


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