Visual Basic

I am in the process of getting some of my strategies automated. The programmer that I am talking to wants to use Visual Basic. I am not a programmer so I am curious if this language is a good language to use for trading. I don't want to spend money on getting this up and going and then find out I should have went with a different language.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

good as any other language

 

depends on what platform you are using.

 

and operating system

 

Gawd, anyone using VB in 2010 sucks. I mean, do you want to trust your project to someone that doesn't have the brain power to use c# or java?

 

VB would not be my first choice. C# should be better.

VB6 is obsolete and unsupported.
If he has to use VB then it would have to be VB.Net or forget it.

Ed

 

Are you sure it's VB, not VB.NET ? Please confirm.

 

VB has advantages over .net when it comes to accessing com modules. Perhaps that is why.

 

VB6 is also debugged and it has completed its service pack cycle. Bugs that will exist for years in .net have been eliminated in VB6.

Having said that, though, it depends on what the program needs to do. If, for example, it needs to feed keystrokes into another application, VB6 would be hard to beat at this time (unless it's a DOS window).

 

That doesn't change the fact that VB6 is closed-source, single-platform, and no longer supported.

Bugs that still exist in VB6 will exist forever and it will never be extended with new features or get an updated IDE.

It's fine for maintenance purposes, but it's a non-starter for the basis of a new project.