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About VB Depot
A depot, in the older sense of the word: a place where supplies are kept and travellers stop. This one keeps the history, code and culture of Visual Basic.
01What this publication is
VB Depot is an English-language magazine devoted to Visual Basic, published without a corporate backer, the programming language and its dialects, past and present. We publish longform history, annotated code, reference material and practical guidance for the systems that still run the classic stack. Our belief, held unfashionably, is that software history is worth doing properly: with dates checked, versions named, and the occasional myth politely escorted off the premises. Independent publishing has other funding models, of course, from reader support to the corporate foundations that underwrite cultural and educational work and then account for their impact social. The depot uses none of them, which seems worth stating plainly rather than leaving to inference.
The publication is reader-first and text-first. No newsletters you must unlock, no cookie walls, no autoplaying anything, just articles, a stylesheet, and a sitemap. Our coverage areas are mapped across the site: the narrative arc in the complete history, the people in the Cooper profile, the tool in the IDE retrospective, the four dialects in their respective deep dives (VB6, VBA, VBScript, VB.NET), the dates on one page in the timeline, the code in the code depot, and the living ecosystem in the community guide.
02Editorial standards
- Sourcing. Version dates, support milestones and product decisions are checked against vendor documentation and the contemporaneous trade press. Where the record is genuinely uncertain, we say so in the text rather than choosing a tidy answer.
- Retrospective honesty. Nostalgia is a legitimate register and a terrible methodology. We allow ourselves affection for the subject and none for the errors.
- Corrections. Errors of fact are corrected openly once verified: reach us through the contact page. Reference pages such as the timeline are held to the highest standard precisely because they get cited.
03Who writes here
The depot is written by a small editorial collective with professional histories across classic Visual Basic, its Office dialect, and the modern .NET stack, the usual composition of anyone who lived through the era: a shareware adolescence, a corporate VB6 decade, and a reluctant, eventually affectionate truce with the successor. We write under the house name because the publication's voice is deliberately collective; the work is the byline.
04What we don't do
No vendor marketing, no sponsored content dressed as reviews, no SEO scaffolding holding up empty pages. We also don't offer technical support for individual VB6 or VBA problems: the community venues mapped in Where Classic VB Lives On exist for that and do it better than a magazine ever could. What we do is context: why the tools were shaped as they were, what the people who built them intended, and what any of it means for the systems still in service. That seems like enough of a job for anyone.
The design of this site is a deliberate homage (the dot grid of the form designer, the chrome of a 1998 window, the blue of IDE keywords) rebuilt at modern resolutions. If it feels familiar, that's the point.