Hands on - Visual programming - Back to basics. Rolling your own software can be fun with Microsoft's new low-cost programming tools.

Publication: Personal Computer World

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COPYRIGHT 2005 VNU Business Media Europe

Byline: Tim Anderson.

The days when magazines carried pages of type-in listings for your Spectrum or Atari computer are long gone and little missed. Even amid all the tedium of lines such as 'GOTO ZAPALIENS' there was a touch of adventure that has largely been lost. That was partly because early PCs did very little out of the box. They were inert lumps, waiting for you to come up with the magic codes that made them do something interesting.

Today's PCs are incomparably more powerful, but with mountains of software a few clicks away on the Internet there is less incentive to sit down and 'roll your own' programs.

Another problem is the complexity of today's programming tools. In particular, Visual Basic has, in some ways, gone backwards in its usability. Version 1 in 1991 was delightfully easy to use. At about the time of version 4 in 1995 it began to lose its click-and-go simplicity, and the 2002 move to Visual Basic .Net bewildered many traditional VB coders, despite its many technical advantages.

Microsoft has now produced a new suite of products that aim to put the fun back into programming as well as being genuinely useful tools. The Express series, including Visual Basic Express (see screen 1), Visual Web Developer and SQL Server 2005 Express, will be released in November and, while prices have not yet been confirmed, they will be modest. The beta versions are high quality and free, but don't install...

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