It was in 1988 when Alan Cooper, also known as the Father of Visual Basic, introduces a drag-and-drop shell prototype called Tripod to BIll Gates. Microsoft bought the concept and named it as Ruby. The program evolved, thus the birth of Visual Basic. Since its official launch in 1990, the Visual Basic approach has become the norm for programming languages.

Visual Basic is a Microsoft-developed programming language and environment that is based on the BASIC language and was one of the first products to provide a graphical programming environment and a paint metaphor for developing user interfaces.

Visual Basic is easy to learn and fast to write code with, the visual basic programmer can add a substantial amount of code through dragging and dropping controls, e.g. buttons and dialog boxes. It's sometimes used for prototyping of application which will later be written in a more difficult but efficient language.

Visual Basic is thoroughly called a visual programming environment used for developing Windows applications and is event-driven, which means that procedures are automatically used every time the end user chooses menu items, clicks the mouse and other activities on the screen.

Visual Basic also have visual environments for many programming languages, including C, C++, Pascal, and Java. Aptly called a Rapid Application Development system, Visual Basic enables programmers to quickly build prototype applications.

Developing applications through VB can be summarized in this approach: designing the application's appearance, assigning property settings to objects of programs and writing the code for specific tasks at runtime.

A number of areas are using Visual Basic in developing their applications. It is often used in business, commerce, consulting firms, education, law, science, medicine, accounting, marketing and a lot more.