Is Visual Basic inferior to C#?

Is Visual Basic inferior to C#? The reason I am asking this, is because I recently found that there are a few things that Microsoft supports in C#, which are not supported in VB.

• SharePoint Extensions for Visual Studio 2005 provides more templates for C# then in VB.
• The query expressions in C# LINQ contain more possibilities then in VB.
• The LINQ samples for the Orcas March 2007 CTP were updated for C# within days and the samples for VB is still not available.

What is going on? Up until recently the main difference in what you could do in VB and C# was the calling of “unsafe” methods.

No, VB is not inferior. It's sometimes also the other way around. VB 9 has XML literals, and C# 3 does not (and probably never will). VB has the My-namespace. There are a lot more default Code Snippets for VB than for C#. The only conclusion I can make is that VB and C# have different features because they are built by different teams and they have different goals. Which is a good thing.

Wow, Thanks TommyCarlier. Hip Hip Hooray!

TommyCarlier wrote:

VB has the My-namespace.

A lot of things: books, websites, 3rd party tools, etc. have more support for C# than VB.NET. It think it's assumed that more people use C#, but I'm not sure that's true - not if all the millions of classic VB programmers upgraded to VB.NET it wouldn't be anyway. But Microsoft has promoted C# as the 'serious' .NET language, so the perception is out there that supporting C# is a must and that VB.NET is a bonus.

At work I write ASP.NET and Webservices most of the time and the company uses VB.NET for all it's .NET projects. I hadn't used VB.NET before I joined them (although I had used VB6 for many years), but I was a user of C# for several years and convinced them to hire me based on how much transferable knowlege there is between the two as well as my classic VB experience.

Anyway, my observation is that VB.NET is pretty-much perfect for the work we do. Mostly due to one feaure: the compiler generates code such that in comparisons operations, the empty string is equal to null (Nothing in VB.NET). That saves *so* much redundant typing that you have to put in by hand when you write in C#. OK, there are other benefits to VB.NET and there are also some downsides, but certainly anything you can write in C# can also be written in VB.NET.

Klaus Enevoldsen wrote:



Is Visual Basic inferior to C#?

Hi

It is amazing that people are so strongly pro or anti a language.
However if you look at the world in general there are many things like religion where people have vastly different standpoints!

Anyway from 'my' experience in the business world - one can write a VB.NET application - and write the same C# application and the quality (if the same 'process' was followed) will be exactly the same.

So I ALWAYS try and think of the domain/context etc. that the 'language' will be used in to determine whether it is the 'better' language for the job.

Think about it, i would not try and speak Afrikaans (which is my home language) in America if I'm trying to do business with a large organization ....

So try not to think of which language is better, rather think of it this way by asking yourself.

"In this context, which language would be better?"

And think about things like!

- functional requirements of the system
- developer skills ! ! !
- maintenance, will it be inhouse? do the inhouse developers know that language ? their experience thereof?

So there are many many things to consider than just plainly making a statement like ...
language x is better than language y because it is higher up in the alphabet .....

just another comment

Ion Todirel wrote:

indeed it is a great, big and happy world,

my dream is to be able to use different languages in the same project, like in ASP.NET, compile them to different assemblies and the link together with ilmerge, or something like that...

cheong wrote:

Ion Todirel said:

indeed it is a great, big and happy world,

my dream is to be able to use different languages in the same project, like in ASP.NET, compile them to different assemblies and the link together with ilmerge, or something like that...

That's something I want to know too.

I know that we can create 2 separate folders under App_Code in ASP.NET application, one for VB.NET and one for C#, to use both language in the same project. But is it possible to create a partial class in both language, some in VB.NET and some in C#?

TommyCarlier wrote:

No, VB is not inferior.

Heres the thing... THEY BOTH MERGE TO IL. Also, some features in IL aren't yet in C# or VB. They use the same namespaces (Except Microsoft.VisualBasic) and they use the same intermediate language... IL! If the teams would make them the same, they would be exactly the same and code conversion would be SO much simpler... but it's not!

BTW...

Dim BG as Microsoft.BillGates
Dim VBprogrammer as Person
BG = VBprogrammer

Its true... Gates is a VB fan!

z2bass wrote:

Its true... Gates is a VB fan!

cheong wrote:



Ion Todirel wrote: indeed it is a great, big and happy world, my dream is to be able to use different languages in the same project, like in ASP.NET, compile them to different assemblies and the link together with ilmerge, or something like that...

That's something I want to know too.

I know that we can create 2 separate folders under App_Code in ASP.NET application, one for VB.NET and one for C#, to use both language in the same project. But is it possible to create a partial class in both language, some in VB.NET and some in C#?

JosephSpaur - MSFT wrote:



cheong wrote:  Ion Todirel wrote: indeed it is a great, big and happy world, my dream is to be able to use different languages in the same project, like in ASP.NET, compile them to different assemblies and the link together with ilmerge, or something like that... That's something I want to know too. I know that we can create 2 separate folders under App_Code in ASP.NET application, one for VB.NET and one for C#, to use both language in the same project. But is it possible to create a partial class in both language, some in VB.NET and some in C#?

This isn't as easily doable in ASP.NET using the App_Code folder, if you wanted to have part of an assembly written in C# and another part in VB.NET the key is to use modules (C# compiler has a "/t:module" switch that outputs a *.netmodule) Then you can include a module into an assembly using "/addmodule" on the command line compile.

I've never actually done this (or know anyone that has), but I don't imagine there should be many problems..

Ion Todirel wrote:



my dream is to be able to use different languages in the same project, like in ASP.NET, compile them to different assemblies and the link together with ilmerge, or something like that...