So: I am a sad middle-aged person trying to teach himself Visual Basic so I can write a little app to help teach something. I'm making some progress, but it would REALLY help if I could find a forum like this one, only full of very patient Visual Basic experts. Any suggestions? There seem to be a lot out there, but I don't know which one is the best/most up-to-date.
Stackoverflow is where i normally go in my fits of rage at compilers. If I remember right there is a VB.net forum that was pretty good.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vb.net http://www.vbforums.com/index.php https://www.guru99.com/vba-tutorial.html Also (this is probably not helpful), I've built some random little applications in XAML and C# it's pretty easy to learn. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/get-started/create-a-hello-world-app-xaml-universal
Is Visual Basic still a thing? Do they still maintain it and keep it up to date? I thought it was declared legacy over a decade ago... If it is as I think it is - it will be hard to find people still talking about it. I believe that whatever the current incarnation of Borland is still maintain Delphi which was like a super-duper version of Visual Basic but with a more powerful compiler below it and Object Pascal instead of basic. Without knowing what it is that you are trying to write - it is hard to tell you what the best option might be. If you just want something that is relatively easy to use to develop stuff you can use and share with students - it is hard to knock Javascript and HTML in the browser, especially since so many schools now use chromebooks. You can get real fancy stuff as well, like writing code with Vue or React - to create really capable applications that run in the browser or wrap it with Cordova to put it on mobile devices.
A long time ago, like back in my day, Visual Basic was a good way for the novice programmer to get into some real programming. I once wrote a program in Visual Basic for a bakery that could keep track of product consumed in order to order more just in time. I'm sure it's a dinosaur now.