Graphical Interface Environment

• Visual Basic features a development environment that is more than a place to type source code and maybe some tools for organizing many pages of this code. Users who want to create a graphical user interface must manually type out the code to create those graphical components. Visual Basic comes with an environment that allows you to select graphical components from a tool bar, and create interfaces as if you were using a drawing program.
  
  

Graphical Event Assignment

• Most programming languages use code to create the interface, and that code is grouped with the code that dictates the behavior of the graphical components. Programmers must comment and document source code so they can find which code blocks control which items. Visual Basic's graphical environment creates a graphical list of your graphical components. You click on these components to reveal the area where you add the code to dictate the components' behavior, and use this same method to see your code later.
  
  

Object Orientation

• Visual Basic is an object-oriented language. This means that the language allows users to create the functional blocks of code called "classes" that can be used several times in the program as "instance objects." These classes allow programmers to create programs that can perform complex operations without requiring the programmer to create a labyrinth of code. They also allow the programmer to call on classes created by Microsoft to use features of the Windows operating system.
  
  

Compilation

• Visual Basic is a compiled language. That is, the user creates the code that will constitute the program in a format humans can understand (namely, the Visual Basic programming language). When a programmer is finished, he then sends this code to the compiler, which converts the source code from the format humans can understand into a machine assembly computers can understand. At compile time, the code the programmer wrote and the code represented by the various graphical components of Visual Basic's interface are combined and sent to the compiler.