Language choice.. Need some assistance.

[Aaron Smith]

Our company is trying to decide to go .Net or not and which language to
use if we do. I have been doing a lot of research on .Net and VB.Net. I
used to be a VB 6 developer till I started to work here, so all along I
have been promoting VB. I'm also a VC++ developer, but have a little
less experiance in that than in VB. I would like to know what the
biggest difference, drawbacks, and advantages to using C# over VB.Net or
vice versa.

It's at a point here where we will have to rewrite all our applications
anyway, and our developers are going to be forced to learn whatever the
owners decide, so we are going to move to whatever language will fit our
needs the best at this time.

I've heard you can mix C# and VB.Net.. Is this true and does it work
well? What other options would we have that would possibly be better
than C# and VB.Net?

Thanks,
Aaron

 

[Arne Janning]

Our company is trying to decide to go .Net or not and which language to
use if we do. I have been doing a lot of research on .Net and VB.Net. I
used to be a VB 6 developer till I started to work here, so all along I
have been promoting VB. I'm also a VC++ developer, but have a little less
experiance in that than in VB. I would like to know what the biggest
difference, drawbacks, and advantages to using C# over VB.Net or vice
versa.

It's at a point here where we will have to rewrite all our applications
anyway, and our developers are going to be forced to learn whatever the
owners decide, so we are going to move to whatever language will fit our
needs the best at this time.

I've heard you can mix C# and VB.Net.. Is this true and does it work well?
What other options would we have that would possibly be better than C# and
VB.Net?

Hi Aron,

some introductory info from Microsoft:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/whitepapers/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/vsintro7/html/vxgrfLanguageEquivalents.asp
http://blogs.msdn.com/csharpfaq/archive/2004/03/11/87816.aspx

Cheers

Arne Janning

 

[Aaron Smith]

Thank you Arne, that clears up some stuff. I guess I should dig deeper
into MS's site. I was kind of hoping to get more developer opinion too
though.

Aaron

Aaron

 

[Arne Janning]

Thank you Arne, that clears up some stuff. I guess I should dig deeper
into MS's site. I was kind of hoping to get more developer opinion too
though.

Hi Aaron,

I know that you expected more developer opinions but:
from the mere technical point of view everything is described in the MS
documents and the rest can be said in one sentence:

"C# vs. VB.NET is the most insipid discussion there is, if
everyone spent as much time learning .NET instead of having this
argument..."
(William Ryan, eMVP)

Simply search for "c# vs vb.net" in groups.google.com and you'll find more
than 11.000 threads dealing with this topic.
http://groups.google.de/groups?q=c# vs vb.net

Cheers

Arne Janning

 

[Aaron Smith]

Holy moley, you're right... There are a ton. 11,300 is what it maxed out
at. I don't want to read THAT many discussions on it. Guess I'll
stick with MS's site.

Aaron

 

[Niki Estner]

IMHO it was a bad idea for MS to offer multiple languages. There should
have
been only one language for .NET. Think of all the duplication of effort
and
wasted discussion time having multiple languages causes - and its all
pointless since it all compiles to equivalent code. Oh well I guess the
booksellers will be happy.

Let's see: I have an Ada95 compiler here, and a gnu C compiler. Both produce
equivalent x86 code, so there should only be one of them?
Doesn't that apply to every programming language?
So, should we all write... turing machines?

Niki

 

[Andrew Faust]

Our company is trying to decide to go .Net or not and which
language to use if we do. I have been doing a lot of research
on .Net and VB.Net. I used to be a VB 6 developer till I
started to work here, so all along I have been promoting VB.

Don't assume that your skills in VB6 will translate in to skills
in VB.NET. Other than the name
and some of the control structures, there are absolutely no
similarities.

I'm also a VC++ developer, but have a little less experiance in
that than in VB. I would like to know what the biggest
difference, drawbacks, and advantages to using C# over VB.Net
or vice versa.

Likewise, other than some of the control structures there are
really no similarties between
C# and C++. Don't let the names fool you. In fact C# is patterned
after Java, so if you know
Java, learning C# is pretty easy.

It's at a point here where we will have to rewrite all our
applications anyway, and our developers are going to be forced
to learn whatever the owners decide, so we are going to move to
whatever language will fit our needs the best at this time.

I'd say go with C#. I know serveral experienced VB6 programmers
who started with
VB.NET first, and after they started working with C# decided they
couldn't stand VB.NET.

C# is just an elegant language, and it's easy to write clean code
with.

I've heard you can mix C# and VB.Net.. Is this true and does it
work well? What other options would we have that would possibly
be better than C# and VB.Net?

Yes. In fact, because all .NET languages (Delphi 8 included)
compile down to CLI instead of
machine language, any assemblies written in one .NET language can
be used from within any other
..NET language.

Andrew Faust

 

[Aaron Smith]

That's interesting.... Thank you for the information.

 

[Cor Ligthert]

Aaron,

Some people say that it would be good when all people on the world where
speaking the same language (and than of course the major one Chinese)
however they don't.

Cor

 

[Paul Clement]

¤
¤ ¤ > Our company is trying to decide to go .Net or not and which
¤ > language to use if we do. I have been doing a lot of research
¤ > on .Net and VB.Net. I used to be a VB 6 developer till I
¤ > started to work here, so all along I have been promoting VB.
¤
¤ Don't assume that your skills in VB6 will translate in to skills
¤ in VB.NET. Other than the name
¤ and some of the control structures, there are absolutely no
¤ similarities.

You sound like a disgruntled "Classic VB" developer. ;-)

While there are differences, partly due to the language being .NETitified, to state that there are
no similarities is spreading disinformation.

¤
¤ I'd say go with C#. I know serveral experienced VB6 programmers
¤ who started with
¤ VB.NET first, and after they started working with C# decided they
¤ couldn't stand VB.NET.
¤
¤ C# is just an elegant language, and it's easy to write clean code
¤ with.
¤

Not sure what makes it elegant. Certainly not the braces or other syntactical anomalies such as
semi-colons, case sensitivity, missing mnemonic keywords, goofy looking operators, etc. etc.

There's nothing specific to C# that enables you to write clean code.


Paul ~~~ (e-mail address removed)
Microsoft MVP (Visual Basic)