Conclusion and outlook

VB remains a highly effective prototyping tool; its quick learning curve and wealth of development components make it one of the best in its category.

Its Web extensions now put it at the forefront of Internet and intranet application development. In fact, the tool's user-friendliness and simplicity, combined with its component-based approach via ActiveX, are prompting more and more companies to choose it for the development of their intranet systems, for which they master the client environments. What's more, VB will soon be supporting XML for the development of Web interfaces.

Nevertheless, VB is not a reference tool for non-Microsoft technologies, such as CORBA, which it does not support, or Java, which is offered separately in Visual J++.

Finally, VB is not a design tool and its object approach is still very...