There is no reason for this to turn into a coding language religious debate. People who make blanket statements that language A is better than Language B are either pushing an agenda or lack experience in the other language IMO. There is no best language. They are tools. Some tools are better for certain jobs than others but that doesn't make the language better than the other in an absolute sense. The key as a developer is to pick the best tool for the job by understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of the languages under consideration. When you come right down to it with the current speed of the modern compilers the main difference in how fast a program will run when developed in several different languages depends primarily on how efficiently the code was written and adapted to utilize the language's speed optimizers. The greatest speed improvements always come from the developer's implementation rather than the specific language they choose. One tool I've found that fills in some of the deficiencies of VB is powerbasic. www.powerbasic.com It is very similar to VB and allows for natively compiled windows DLLs, which are a must when working in trading programs like Tradestation. The best part of this language is they claim speed better than C++ while writing code in VB syntax. I have to admit, though that I haven't found many instances where using a PB dll was faster than writing the same code within VB. .NET may be able to compile Win DLLs so this may not be such a big benefit.
Has anyone attempted to tackle the .NET Framework without using Visual Studio? I'm interested in looking into C# but am afraid it might be like my experience in trying to learn Java without an IDE (no progress). C# seems to be the new pet language of Microsoft so it appears that this is where the really good development is emerging.
Microsoft is now giving away VB.Net and C#.Net right now. You can buy Standard Edition C# on Egghead's for $90! (I don't think you'll get Source Safe or Crystal Reports.) My opinion is for $90 that it is well worth the money with all the built in Visual Studio functionality that you'll get with it (including the IDE, Help, etc.). I've heard you can do .Net with a text editor but I can't imagine why you would given that it's so dang cheap right now.
Methinks not. Unless you are using an atomic clock to measure the diff. I've coded apps in Excel VBA using that stinking DDE and it runs as fast as the quotes do. If you are tracking 1000 symbols you may run into a problem, but 10 or 20 is not. All this on a lowly AMD 900. If you are running the newer boxes at 2000 mHz+, I defy anyone to show me a usable difference in VB, VBA, C++ , or Atari Basic for that matter. I hope some of you are better at trading than advising on programming languages.
Please do not compare programming and trading stock777, you are not the ultimate answer to his questions. Language wars can go forever. Objectively, VB si fine for your needs. If you are computing under linux or *nix obviously you don't have much choice, go for C, C++ or OCAML. For windows, go for VB. If you're calculating earth simulations, DO NOT go with VB
Are the free versions something that would have to be coded with a text editor or does Microsoft's freebie come with the Visual Studio IDE?
Actually, all the above stink. If you're not coding in native machine language, you are giving up too much overhead. Sadly, the last assembly code I was good at was 6502.
But recently compilers have become so good that they rival with ASM code But I do agree that ASM is probably the fastest of all but very unfriendly. I used to code ASM. Files were tiny and fast as ever but you had to know what you were doing in order to do anything.