History of VB.NET

5. Language Features of VB.NET

Section Owner: Gurneet Singh MVP Content Contributors: Amit Kukreja , Arvind Rangan , Reshmi Nair

5.1 History of VB.NET

.NET framework offers a myriad of languages which puts us programmers into a deep thought process about which programming language best suits our needs. Which language is the best language choice? If you are a VB wizard, should you take the time to learn C or continue to use VB.NET? Are C ASP.NET pages faster than VB.NET ASP.NET pages? These are questions that you may find yourself asking, especially when youre just starting to delve into .NET. Fortunately the answer is simple: there is no best language. All .NET languages use, at their root, functionality from the set of classes provided by the .NET Framework. Therefore, everything you can do in VB.NET you can do in C, and vice-a-versa. The differences occur in three main areas: syntax, object-oriented principles, and the Visual Studio .NET IDE. Syntax concerns the statements and language elements. Object Oriented differences are less obvious, and concern differences in implementation and feature sets between the two languages. IDE differences include things like compiler settings or attributes. There is also a fourth area of difference: language features that are present in one language but have no equivalent in the other. If you are more familiar with Java, JScript, or CC++, you may find Cs syntax more familiar than VB.NETs. If youve been doing VB for the past five years, theres no reason to think you have to now switch to a new language although you should always look to be learning new things. The fact is that VB.NET has all the facilities of VB such as not being case-sensitive, having the option of using IntelliSense etc in addition to which you have an ocean of new ideas concepts thrown in for the benefit of programmers. VB has matured as a language and if you do not know it already, its almost 11 years since VB was born. It now provides all facilities for distributed computing and Internet programming for which it was not useful earlier. With VB.NET, due to the .NET framework all the classes and all the namespaces available with the other languages are made available to VB also. This is in addition to the drag and drop facility of building forms and web pages which was always the attraction in the use of VB. Thus it has the dual advantage of ease of use and the availability of advanced features. As already stated earlier both VB.NET and C are equally powerful. So the primary reason for which VB could not reach the zenith of popularity has been eradicated and programmers who have been waiting for OOPs concepts to be incorporated into VB are rewarded with this offering of Microsoft.

5.2 Language Fundamentals in VB.NET