CHARACTERISTICS OF VISUAL BASIC

Visual Basic has the following traits which differ from C-derived languages: Boolean constant True has numeric value 1. This is because the Boolean data type is stored as a 16-bit signed integer. In this construct 1 evaluates to 16 binary 1s (the Boolean value True), and 0 as 16 0s (the Boolean value False). This is apparent when performing a Not operation on a 16 bit signed integer value 0 which will return the integer value 1, in other words True= Not False. This inherent functionality becomes especially useful when performing logical operations on the individual bits of an integer such as And, Or and Not. This definition of True is also consistent with BASIC since the early 1970s Microsoft BASIC implementation and is also related to the characteristics of CPU instructions at the time. Logical and bitwise operators are unified. This is unlike all the C-derived languages (such as Java or Perl), which have separate logical and bitwise operators. This again is a traditional feature of BASIC. Variable array base. Arrays are declared by specifying the upper and lower bounds in a way similar to Pascal and Fortran. It is also possible to use the Option Base statement to set the default lower bound. Use of the Option Base statement can lead to confusion when reading Visual Basic code and is best avoided by always specifying the lower bound of the array. This lower bound is not limited to 0 or 1, because it can also be set by declaration. In this way, both the lower and upper bounds are programmable. In more subscript-limited languages, the lower bound of the array is not variable. This uncommon trait does exist in Visual Basic. NET but not in VBScript. Relatively strong integration with the Windows operating system and the Component Object Model. Integers are automatically promoted to reals in expressions involving the normal division operator (/) so that division of an odd integer by an even integer produces the intuitively correct result. There is a specific integer divide operator(\) which does truncate.

By default, if a variable has not been declared or if no type declaration character is specified, the variable is of type Variant. However this can be changed with Deftype statements such as DefInt, DefBool, DefVar, DefObj, DefStr. There are 12 Deftype statements in total offered by Visual Basic6.0.

Following are the steps in feasibility study

1. Constitution of the project team: The objective behind constituting a project team is that future users of the system should be involved in its design and implementation. Their knowledge and experience in the operation area are essential to the success of the system. 2. Identification of potential candidate systems: Keeping in the mind the objectives for which a new system is required, alternative candidate systems should be identified. A number of systems should be identified so that project team has several alternatives to choose a system that best fits organizational requirements. 3. Identification of characteristics of candidate systems: At this stage, the team identifies the various characteristics of candidate systems so that systems that do not meet the initial selection criteria are eliminated as it is difficult and time consuming to have a detailed evaluation of large number of systems. 4. Performance and cost evaluation: Detailed performance and cost evaluation is carried out for those systems which pass successfully through the previous step. At this stage, performance of each system is evaluated against the performance criteria set before the start of the feasibility study. Besides performance, each system should be evaluated in terms of costs too. The costs include all types of costs-cost of initial investment in additional software, hardware, and physical facilities, development and installation cost, cost of training, updating the software, documentation, and the recurring operating cost.

5. Weighting system performance and cost data: Often performance and cost move in the same direction, that is, if the cost is high, it is associated with high performance though it may not be true for all systems. Therefore, mere absolute figures of performance and costs are not sufficient to choose a system. 6. Selection of the best system: Based on the weights assigned to different systems, that system may be selected that has the highest weight score. In actual practice, mere weight scores of different systems are not the sole criteria for selecting a system. 7. Preparation of feasibility reports: When the feasibility study is complete, the project team prepares a feasibility report on the basis of which management tales suitable action including the final selection of a system.

A feasibility covers the following:

1) Technical Feasibility: This involves financial considerations to accommodate technical enhancements. If the budget is a serious constraint, then the project is judged not feasible. In the proposed system only the cost of developing and maintaining the application will be taken into consideration by the institute. There is no need for any special hardware. 2) Economical Feasibility: With the help of this application it will lead to decrease in cost of opening and maintaining offices which will be more than the cost of developing and maintaining the Application. Lesser manpower is needed to maintain an application which will again lead to decrease in cost. 3) Operational Feasibility: This Application is very easy to operate as it is made user friendly. Main consideration is users easy access to all the functionality of the Application.

4) Legal Feasibility: It tries to ensure whether the new system meets the requirements of various information technology regulations such as privacy laws, computer crime laws, software theft laws, malicious access to the data, international laws, etc.