Visual Basic

Ahh, BASIC. Way back in the stone-age of the 80's, it was the first language for budding programmers. The original incarnations of BASIC, while easy to learn, were horribly unstructured, leading to the a rash of GOTO-laden "spaghetti-code". Not many people wipe away tears when reminiscing about BASIC's line numbers and the GOSUB command.

Fast-forward to the early 1990's. While not the monster that Apple was hoping for, HyperCard was a compelling little programming environment that had no equal under Windows. Windows-based HyperCard clones like ToolBook were slow, clunky, and expensive. To finally compete with HyperCard, Microsoft licensed a neat little programming environment named Thunder, releasing it as Visual Basic 1.0. The user-interface was very innovative for the time. The language, while still called Basic (and no longer all-caps), was much more structured. Line numbers were mercy-killed. The language was, in fact, much closer to Pascal with Basic-style verbs than the old ROM BASIC that was built into every TRS-80, Apple ][, and Atari.

Six versions later, Visual Basic is pretty deluxe. The user-interface has made some changes, but still retains its "attach bits of code to the user-interface" motif. This, in combination with instantaneous compiling, makes it a terrific environment for fast prototyping.

Advantages: Neat IDE. Easy to learn. Instantaneous compiling makes for very fast and easy prototyping. Lots and lots of add-ons available. While there are currently third-party DirectX add-ons for Visual Basic, DirectX version 7 is going to include support for Visual Basic right out of the box.

Disadvantages: Apps are large and require several large runtime DLL's to run. While form and dialog-based apps are easy to make, writing good graphical apps is more difficult. Calling Windows API functions is clunky, because VB data structures don't map nicely to C. Has OO features, but is not fully object-oriented. Proprietary.

Portability: Worse than dismal. Since Visual Basic is owned by Microsoft, you're pretty-much limited to whatever platforms they've ported it too. That means that you've got the choice of Windows, Windows, or Windows. Note that there are, however, a couple of tools that help convert VB apps to Java.

Games Written in Visual Basic: A few. There are lots of shareware games done in VB, and a couple of commercial offerings.

Resources: The Microsoft VB page has a little info.

Java