What's Wrong with VB.NET?

VB.NET has the reputation of being a second class language in the .NET world.  A lot of this has to do with the history of VB and its transformation from VB6 into VB.NET.  Conversely, there is a perception that C# is the "real" .NET language, and I think that comes from its (much shorter) history.

At a recent user group meeting, someone joked that VB had been deprecated, and I will admit that I picked up and echoed that joke.  I hope that folks could tell that I wasn't serious.  When I'm talking to people, I try to point out VB resources where I can -- for example, my favorite Silverlight and WPF books have both VB and C# versions available -- but I'm personally more familiar with the C# resources since those are the ones I use on a day-to-day basis.

Today, VB.NET and C# are pretty much the same language with different syntax (at least that's how I like to think of them).  And the great thing about .NET is that whatever language you work with still gets compiled down to the same IL, and you can use assemblies in your project that are created in any .NET language (in fact, you probably don't even know what language a third-party assembly was created with).

Real programmers don't get stuck on syntax.  Programmers in general are opinionated and have their tools and languages of choice.  Good programmers generally have several different languages under their belts (and not just .NET languages, but things like Ruby, Python, Perl, Delphi, and Java).  I have my language of choice (which is currently C#, but has been different in the past), and before I start a task I try to make sure there isn't another tool that would do the job better.

Why the Bum Rap?
So, why does VB.NET have this reputation?  My theory is based on looking at the history of .NET.  When .NET launched, it was a brand new platform.  Along with that launch, Microsoft was promoting a brand new language (C#) that was created just for that platform.  In order for .NET to succeed, Microsoft had to get as many people on board as possible.  C# was the vehicle they used for most of their demonstrations.  This was because C# had all of the capabilities of .NET (at the time).  Because of this, C# became equated in many people's minds as the "primary" .NET language.

But Microsoft also knew that there were millions of people invested in VB.  They could not succeed if they forced all of the programmers who were comfortable with the VB syntax to switch over to a C-based syntax.  And more importantly, they couldn't force those developers to abandon all of their existing code.  So, we got VB.NET.  And that's sort of where the problems started.

First of all, VB.NET was very different from VB6.  There were a number of "features" that were put in to VB.NET to make migration of existing VB6 code easier.  But if programmers wanted to really start using the .NET platform to its full potential, they needed to re-write quite a bit of code to fit in with the new paradigm.

VB.NET and C# had quite a few differences in the early versions.  There were some constructs in C# that did not have an equivalent in VB.NET (and vice-versa).  In addition, Visual Studio tended to favor C# when it came to features such as refactoring and IntelliSense.  C# would get these feature updates first, and then they were made available to VB.NET later (as much later as the next release).

Forget Everything You Thought You Knew
But it's time to forget everything you thought you knew about the differences between VB.NET and C#.  With the latest release of .NET 4, the languages are almost equivalent; there are a few minor differences, but for all intents and purposes, you can accomplish the same tasks in similar ways.

Steve K. pointed me to this blog article from Steve Wiltamuth regarding the futures of both languages: VB and C# Coevolution.  In short, Microsoft is committed to moving both languages forward in the same direction and keep parity in the features and tools (such as the refactoring and IntelliSense features in Visual Studio).

Wrap Up
The good news of the similarities between the languages is that both C# and VB.NET programmers can take advantage of the vast amount of sample code that's available on the net.

Having both C# and VB.NET is great for the .NET development community.  C# (and the C-based syntax) provided a comfortable migration for folks using Java and C++; VB.NET provide a comfortable migration path for folks using VB.  Together, this has created a mix of developers that can share code and still hang on to their preferred syntax.  That sounds like the best of both worlds to me.

Happy Coding!