Usability of Visual Basic for Parallel Programming on Windows NT

Visual Basic is a very popular language. Many hardware engineers have learned Visual Basic because of its simplicity, but have never learned C or C++. Furthermore, people are choosing not to use C or C++ for business software development, but instead are embracing languages such as Visual Basic. Since one of the goals of the parallel programming community has been to encourage more widespread use of parallelism in software, this body of programming talent needs to be addressed. This thesis intends to prove that Visual Basic can be used for parallel programming, that using it is at least as easy as using C or C++, and to compare the performance of selected parallel Visual Basic programs to parallel C programs. Additionally, since Visual Basic programs only run on Microsoft Windows-based computers, which generally have but a single processor, this thesis will prove that Visual Basic parallel programs can achieve parallelism through the use of distributed computing