Paul Vick - What has Visual Basic learned from the Web?

I'm going to make an "orthogonal" comment as there is not much here for a direct reply:

My verdict on the VB.NET vs. C# flame wars:

As soon as the next version of VB.NET is released, it will (according to the promise) support XML documentation without third-party add-ins. Once this happens, VB.NET will be equal in every important way to C#---and will exceed C# in the area of ease of use and RAD stuff (what with the forthcoming My namespace).

I will definitely be using VB.NET when the next version of Visual Studio Tools for Office ships. But everything else I write remains in C#---not becuase I "hate" VB.NET (and me being accused of hating is often veiled self-flattery) but because I love writing comments for my code (and it's also a cute little academic excercise to work with a syntax similar to Java just in case I get tempted by a job offer from the Sun world I can't refuse).

I however DO hate VB.net - I will use VB6 or C# .. nothing else.

Care to elaborate on that? What's so bad about VB.NET? I've used MBASIC, MSX-BASIC, GW-BASIC, QuickBASIC, PowerBasic and all incarnations of Visual Basic from version 3.0 up, and I absolutely love VB.NET.

Of course personal opinions vary and I'm not questioning your right to hate VB.NET, but I'm curious what is it that makes it so bad for you.

I do use C# sometimes, but basically only when I need either unsafe code or unsigned types.

For me.  My preferance for C# is as simple as the use of
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and
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BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.  It originated at Dartmouth University in the 1960s.  Visual Basic's roots are in BASIC.  For example, in BASIC the DIM statement declares an array and DIM is short for "dimension."  This has been artificially extended in Visual Basic to be the generic initiator of any declaration including the instantiation of an object which concept had not been conceived in the 1960s. 

BASIC is important in the history of Microsoft in that it was the first product the company ever sold.  Some fantastic productivity features, such as Forms, first made their appearance in Visual Basic.  Rapid Development and Deployment is possible in Visual Basic.  Unassisted Windows development in C, and MFC in C++ do not admit to rapidity.   MFC is a contortion and sometimes the opposite of helpful.  Then we get to the .NET Framework, CLR and C#, which are works of art, in my humble opinion.

Visual Basic is fine for people who have become used to used and have become productive with it.  It isn't block structured and it is tied to BASIC which turn some people off.  I prefer C# because it is a modern language and a viable alternative to Java.  In any case, it is a relatively simple matter to hand translate Visual Basic snippets into C#.