Welcome to the club, McFly! You say "BASIC" to somebody who hasn't used VB, and they look down their nose at you with haughty geek disdain. Doesn't bother me in the least. VB so greatly enhances my productivity that I can laugh all the way to the bank. Recent improvements have also pretty much taken away the once-legitimate argument that it's slow.

One of its most powerful features is the way it makes the ActiveX interface trivially easy to implement. I've tried to do ActiveX in C++, and found myself spending 90% of my time on the mechanical interface code, leaving little time for the application itself. Nowadays, when I need C++ performance in an ActiveX environment, I write a simple old-fashioned DLL in C++, and wrap it in VB to get the ActiveX interface nearly for free.

You're going to enjoy VB.

--Robert