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I was wondering what the difference is between installing Visual Basic and Visual Studio?

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Visual Basic is a component of Visual Studio. Visual Studio normally refers to the entire suite of development applications (Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, etc.).

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  • Can Visual Basic do anything that Visual Studio can't?
    – Brian
    Dec 16, 2010 at 0:41
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Visual Studio is the integrated development environment (IDE) used to create programs in Visual Basic or the other 'Visual' named languages. So in that sense, it doesn't quite make sense to compare the IDE to the programming language: Visual Studio is like the text editor, Visual Basic is like the language you are writing in.

However, when you download Visual Basic Express, you are really downloading Visual Studio Express with appropriate components to make Visual Basic programs. It's called Visual Basic Express in the Start menu and the title bar, even though it's really Visual Studio Express underneath. So in that sense, your question may really be "What's the difference between Visual Basic Express (Visual Studio Express) and Visual Studio?"

There are several different editions of Visual Studio, starting with the free Express editions and then continuing with the Professional, Premium, and Ultimate editions that cost money and have additional features. You can look at the Wikipedia article Microsoft Visual Studio for a description of the different editions and a comparison chart. Or you can look at Microsoft's Visual Studio Products page for a comparison chart of the commercial versions. (Express isn't shown in this comparison.)

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  • What's the difference between Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio? Oh, about $675. Dec 28, 2011 at 1:05
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Visual Basic is a event driven programming language, it is just like basic(coding) the difference is that it has buttons, textboxes, etc basically graphics that are programed to conduct an action.

Visual Studio Is a software development environment (also know as an Integrated Development Environment or IDE), It's used primarily by Software Developers to build Software products, websites and Utilities. Visual Studio was introduced by Microsoft in 1998.

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Visual Basic is a programming language. It is also an IDE.

Visual Studio is an IDE that has Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C# and more built in.

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I have no idea why nobody is pointing this out. Before Visual Studio existed, there was a thing called Visual Basic which was both an IDE, and a programming language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(classic) The final release was VB6 in 1998.

VB6 was very popular.

At some point, the Visual Basic IDE was renamed Visual Studio, and other languages were introduced besides the Visual Basic language. So e.g. it became possible to write the new language C#, in the IDE they now called Visual Studio.

And by the way, for the sake of some completeness, i'll mention that besides VB, we also had QB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickBASIC which was very popular in the days of DOS, and even maybe in the command prompt of Windows 95 and 98. Then there was some shift from QB to VBScript. Neither really compare to the power of VB which let you write GUI programs and easily. Visual Basic came at a similar time to QBASIC and the Visual Basic IDE of the early 1990s is very similar to the Visual Studio IDE today.

They probably just renamed the Visual Basic IDE to Visual Studio to make it less confusing since they added languages other than Visual Basic language to it. Back in the days of VB6, VB was the name for the IDE and the language, which wasn't too bad when there was just one language in it.

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Visual Basic is a programming language developed by Microsoft.

(Microsoft) Visual Studio is an IDE which supports you with functionalities when developing software (e.g. written in Visual Basic or another programming language that is supported by the IDE)

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