Programming Windows: Visual Studio (Premium)

Heading into the late 1990s, Microsoft sought to consolidate its developer languages and tools into a single, cohesive environment. The project, originally codenamed “Boston,” resulted in a new integrated suite called Visual Studio that persists to this day.

But long before that would ever happen, Microsoft’s developer tools and environments started humbly with the MS-DOS-based command-line utilities and basic text editors of the 1980s. But thanks to Borland and other competitors that innovated with integrated developer environments (IDEs), Microsoft’s developer offerings matured quickly to match these increasingly sophisticated offerings. And by the end of the decade, the firm offered a variety of DOS-based IDEs for assembly language (MASM, the Microsoft Macro Assembler), C and C++ (Microsoft C and Microsoft C/C++), BASIC (GW-BASIC, QBasic/QuickBASIC, Visual Basic), and other languages (like Pascal and Fortran).

IDEs were important then for the same reason they are today: They allowed developers to write, build, and test their applications from a single place rather than requiring them to drop out of an editor to the DOS command line to compile, build, and test. IDEs offered simple integrated commands for these tasks, and over time, they offered ever-more-sophisticated aids to make software developer easier and less error-prone.

In the early days of Windows, application developers who targeted this graphical operating environment were forced to work in DOS-based IDEs. But as Windows evolved, so too did Microsoft and third-party developer environments, and by the early 1990s, developers could write, build, and test Windows applications entirely from within Windows. By that point, Microsoft’s primary developer environments were Microsoft C/C++, which became Visual C++, and Visual Basic.

They couldn’t have been more different, and not just from a language perspective. Visual C++ targeted professional developers who wrote directly to the Windows API in the C programming language or used C++ frameworks like the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) or the Active Template Library (ATL). Visual Basic, meanwhile, targeted beginners and those who wished to prototype application designs before committing to code.

Visual C++ wasn’t a superset of Visual Basic, or a more sophisticated version of the latter product. Instead, each had evolved separately, were made by different teams, and each included useful functionality that the other lacked. Where Visual Basic living up to its name and was indeed quite visual, Visual C++ did not and was not, and it only included basic visual tools for application resources like menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes. For the main application design, Visual C++ relied instead on wizards that created often obtuse code to construct different types of applications.

Consolidating the two wasn’t a priority at first, and it was hard to imagine a typical Visual Basic developer evolving into a Visual C++...