The language itself was an interpreted BASIC dialect, however speed was maintained through the use of reusable compiled libraries (DLLs and VBX controls).

Visual Basic was extremely popular for business application programming. In contrast, even the smallest Visual Basic basic programs could take reams of program code to write in C or C++. First released in 1991, Microsoft Visual Basic was a programming environment where one could build an application by visually creating the user interface first, and then adding code.