Visual Studio 2010

I am installing visual studio 2010 right now. I’m excited to try the new database features. I heard directly from a Microsoft source that you won’t need to use SQL management studio anymore. I hope it’s true. I’ve also read that VB.NET can now do EVERYTHING that C# can do. They are now a fully merged language. I’m also excited about no longer having to put an underscore (_) at the end of your code line to do line continuation, instead the system recognizes that your line is continuing automatically. That should be really cool. Now I have even more reasons to brag about how VB is better then C#. I’ve always hated semicolons but the C# people would win the argument by saying that line continuation was a hassle in VB, well take that C#, I don’t need a semicolon or a underscore, my language is smarter then yours!

VB vs C#

So I thought that I would throw my opinion out into the C# vs VB.NET debate. Let me say that professionally I have had to program in both languages on a scale of 1 to 10 my skills in VB are a solid 10, but in C# I’d only consider myself a 6 or 7. The thing I usually say when people ask me if I like C# is “No, There are too many semicolons.” It’s funny to me and usually to whomever I’m talking to. But really I have yet to run into a scenario where there is something you can do in C# but you can’t in VB. There are a number of translators on the internet that will translate back and forth from C# to VB and vise versa. So whenever I have to write in C# if I get stuck I write the code out in VB and then translate it to C#.

Since it is easy to call a C# DLL from VB and vise versa, personally I think it does not matter what language you write in. If you have a good multi-tiered architecture you should be able to let one programmer write his tier in VB and another tier in C#, but I have yet to be at a company who thinks this is a good idea. I’m not sure why I guess it’s adding a layer of complexity that project managers do not understand or want to deal with.

So at the end of the day my opionion is that both languages are equal, and you should just write in whatever language you like. I have been writing in BASIC code my entire life, and switching over to C# just seems pointless to me, unless there is a paycheck in it.