The Programming Process in VB 6

Over time you’ll find your own way of writing programs that works best for you. Nevertheless, you’ll generally follow these standard set of steps when creating your Visual Basic programs:

1. Decide what your application is to do by creating an overall design.
2. Create the visual portion of your application (the screens and menus that your users will interact with).
3. Add Visual Basic programming language code to tie the visual elements together and to automate the program.
4. Test your application to locate and remove any bugs you find.

Compile your tested application and distribute the compiled application to your users.By waiting until you’ve thoroughly tested your Visual Basic application program before you compile the program, you help speed up the testing process. When you test your program interactively, you can locate and correct bugs that you find more easily and quickly. Visual Basic includes a special helper system called a debugger that you can use to help you locate bugs that appear during testing.
Before Visual Basic, writing a program was more tedious for several reasons.In a text-based environment, you would have to design on paper all the screens that the user would see. You would then take that paper to the users to see if you were designing exactly what they wanted. If you were designing a program for mass distribution, such as a game or a general-purpose business application, you would still write down all the screens, create complicated data flows to and from the various screens, design the disk files needed by the
program, and basically plan every detail before you ever went to the keyboard.Visual Basic’s visual nature encourages you to go to the keyboard much earlier in the programming process. Instead of using paper, you’ll design screens with Visual Basic’s tools.