Visual Basic can mean more than one thing. Originally it was a standalone programming tool for creating Windows GUI apps. The last version of this was Visual Basic 6.0 from 1998. This version is dead. If you liked its simplicity and want to use something similar consider*Xojo, which is the*modern alternative to VB. Visual Basic for Applications is a version of Visual Basic that is used to program Office apps such as Access, Excel, Word and PowerPoint. It is still around, but you can’t use it to make actual apps. Visual Basic .NET (now just called Visual Basic) is part of .NET and is a powerful programming language that is made needlessly complex by using the .NET framework. Most .NET programmers prefer C#.