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.

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

VBA/Excel®

VBScript/HTML

VBScript/ASP

VB.NET/ASPX

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