Question

I’m a chemical engineering student with an interest in programming. Most of my programing experience comes form Excel VBA. My goal is to develop desktop applications with GUI that mainly are number crunching, read/write to files and some command lines (on windows and linux). I would like to know what is the best programing language and tools that I should learn.

Some more background information:
Programing in my area is something that very few consider spending time (at least where I study). Most people just use Excel and other commercial software. But programming simple applications with a GUI would be amazing, since there are many “old-teacher-written” FORTRAN programs that aren’t easily available otherwise.

Thanks in advance 🙂

Answer 1

I suggest you use Visual Basic .NET.

• It will be easy to get started since you know VBA already, so you have to learn about the .NET Framework, but not a new language syntax at the same time.
• Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Desktop is a great free IDE for VB.NET.
• Since it’s based on .NET you can use .NET libraries written in C#, and there are online tools to translate your code to C# if you ever need to.
• A great example written in VB.NET in your domain is the DWSIM chemical process simulator. DWSIM is open source software, so you can learn by exploring the code yourself. (And it runs on Linux and Mac OS X using the Mono runtime – showing you how your VB.NET code can be cross-platform too.)
• You can integrate your VB.NET code with Excel using Excel-DNA – even migrate your Excel VBA add-ins to VB.NET with minimal changes. So you can make utilities for other Excel users.
• .NET also has very good integration to native code libraries, via the P/Invoke features. So you might be able to call those FORTRAN libraries from your VB.NET code too.