In honor of the 50th Anniversary of BASIC, Microsoft’s VB team created a Roslyn powered homage to QuickBasic. This IDE looks like the original, but has modern features such as code completion:
While it is easy to dismiss QuickVB as just a novelty, it demonstrates what’s possible in the applications of the future. Using this as a starting point, developers can leverage Roslyn to build powerful in-application IDEs that empower users to create their own macros and extensions.
This isn’t a new concept, but it lost much of its appeal when Microsoft deprecated the Visual Basic for Applications SDK and failed to deliver on Visual Studio Tools for Applications. With Roslyn being open source, developers may be more willing to invest in this route again.
QuickVB is offered on CodePlex under the Apache 2 license.