Common Applications

What are five common applications that visual basic is most suited for. I have tried using search engines but they are not returning much. This is a homework assignment so please can you give vague answers.

Not sure what you're after, as it may be quite difficult to exactly arrange them into specific categories, here are some thoughts ( whether they be wrong or correct ) :

Database Applications ( using a Database as a back- end )

Yep that's exactly what I am looking for. So VB is good for creating a programme to act at the front of a database. Are there any other tasks VB is good for?

Thankyou

hmm, there are 1000s of them, would be easier to tell you what it is not good for ;)

VB is best suited to get an application up and running quickly without having to have in depth knowledge of the hardware devices, stack and registers. In 15+ years I have found very few things that I could not do with VB and all of them were device specific.

ALmost all languages today are "general purpose". So you can make just about anything with any of them in so far as it doesn't require direct low level access to hardware. And even then, with the proper libraries, even that is possible.

The big decision point in using/preferring one language over an other typically isn't the language itself, but specific language or standard library features that are more mature in one environment and limited or even lacking in another.

So unless you have a very very good reason to need a certain capability of a language, there's little reason to drop whatever it is you already know and go for something else instead. And even in this case, the curve to learn a new language might be steeper than finding a library for the language you know that covers your need and learn that instead.

As to some specifics:
VB is a loosely typed language. This has advantages in ease of writing something new. And has disadvantages elsewhere such as performance and robustness in the long term.
The actual language in VB is very simple and doesn't have a lot of features. The strength of VB really lies in the library it supports and it's it's ease of working with 3rd party objects.