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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

vb.net is an odd language. Pretty much useless in a way because it's just a less powerful, oddly-syntaxed C#, after using it for a year at one point. Not a bad language but offers very little that C# doesn't, and is missing some. Handles statement was very nice though.

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I encounter more and more vb.net because Microsoft uses it as their default "scripting" language for products like SQL Reporting Services. And for that, it actually seems to make sense as a language. In small sniplets it works better than C#.

But honestly Microsoft missed a huge opportunity by not simply making classic VB6 code run under the CLR. In entirely defeats the point of having a common language runtime if every language has to look exactly the same. It wouldn't have been an insurmountable project and would have driven higher the adoption of proper .NET.

"...it's just a less powerful... ...c#..."

How so? I use both (my largest C# project was Nokia Maps, largest VB.Net project is my own database + sync engine, at ~110kloc, spread across Windows Desktop, Windows Phone and WCF sync engine). I've not come across any shortcomings in comparison to C#. Granted I'm using the free editions of Visual Studio, and avoid any third-party components or code. What am I missing?

I think you can probably achieve the same results with VB compared to C#, but at the cost of writing more code or slower performance.

VB.Net is about as verbose as C#. There can be no perf differences because they both compile to the same bye code. Assuming the dev knows what he/she is doing when optimising for perf in either language.

Yeah, VB.net is mostly there so that people can upgrade legacy VB6 programs.

Of which there are a lot. Or were, I hope that's changed a little now.

It scares me just how much of the finance sector is still running on some hacked together VB script tied to an excel spreadsheet...

But for anything new, you might as well use C#.

In what way is it less powerful? I use both in my day job. Sometimes I think C# has more elegant syntax (personal opinion) but I have not been able to not do anything I need to do in VB.

Dim has some nice syntactic sugar that is not part of C#. Granted, I like most people prefer C#, but there not quite equivalent.

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