VBScript Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Notes
Dr. Herong Yang, Version 4.01

Quick Introduction of Visual Basic

Part:   1   2 

VB Script Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Notes © Dr. Herong Yang

Data Types and Literals

Variables

Logic Operations

String Operations

Conditional Statements

Arrays

Loop Statements

Functions and Subroutines

Built-in Functions

Variable Inspection

... Table of Contents

This chapter describes:

  • What Is Visual Basic?
  • Using Visual Basic within Internet Explorer
  • Using Visual Basic within Microsoft Access

What Is Visual Basic?

Visual Basic (VB) - A programming language developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows environment. The current version is Visual Basic 6.0.

Visual Basic can be used in two ways:

1. Writing stand alone applications on Microsoft Windows systems.

2. Writing add-on scripts within Microsoft applications.

To write stand alone applications in VB, you need the Microsoft Visual Basic software, which provides you a development environment for entering, debugging, and compiling your applications.

To write add-on scripts in VB within other Microsoft applications, you need to follow the specifications of the hosting application. Usually, the hosting application will:

  • Provide you a specific syntax to enter and store your VB scripts.
  • Provide you an interface to let your scripts to interact with the host application.
  • Restrict your scripts to access certain operating system resources for security reasons.

Examples of Microsoft applications that supports VB scripts:

  • Internet Explorer (IE) - Allows you to include VB scripts in HTML documents to be executed while IE rendering HTML documents on the screen. This is also called client side scripting.
  • Internet Information Services (IIS) - Allows you to include VB scripts in HTML documents to be executed while IIS fetching HTML documents to deliver to the requesting clients. This is also called server side scripting.
  • Microsoft Access - Allows you to add VB codes to customize forms and reports.

Using Visual Basic within Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer (IE) is a Microsoft application that can be used to view HTML documents. IE is one of the Microsoft applications that allows you to write add-on scripts in Visual Basic language in HTML documents.

To add Visual Basic (VB) scripts into your HTML documents, you need to use the "script" tag with the "language=vbscript" attribute. Inside the "script" tag, you can place any number of VB statements. Here is the syntax of adding VB scripts in HTML documents: 

... (HTML tags)
<script language=vbscript>
   ... (VB statements)
</script>
... (HTML tags)

(Continued on next part...)

Part:   1   2 

Dr. Herong Yang, updated in 2006
VBScript Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Notes - Quick Introduction of Visual Basic