Still alive and kicking. (Virtual Basic for Windows) (product announcement)
by Alan R. Bechtold

The advent of Microsoft Windows actually breathed new life into BASIC. Visual Basic for Windows 3.0 is the latest version of the long-lived, popular programming language. It's a graphical application development system for Microsoft Windows 3.0 that combines visual-design tools with a powerful general-purpose programming language and Windows' EXE compiler.

Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and chief executive officer, forecasts that many thousands of Windows applications will be written in Visual Basic. Forty-five independent software developers have already announced and demonstrated more than 60 such products, ranging from custom controls to add-on DLLs for data access and multimedia applications.

Visual Basic for Windows is now available in the U.S. for $199. Microsoft already started shipment of German and French versions and has also scheduled other language versions to follow.