In a recent Hanselminutes episode Scott chats with Paul Vick, Principal VB Architect, and Paul Yuknewicz, a Senior Program Manager on the VB Team about the past, present and future of Visual Basic.
During the interview they talked about a statistic which indicates Visual Basic.NET is the #1 .NET language, based on the various internally ran Microsoft surveys and analysis. This surprises me, I really expected C# to win compared to VB.NET, but perhaps it is true (though sometimes statistics can be misleading and I have not seen them with my own eyes)
The other interesting claim from the same interview is again surprising, the #2 language in .NET platform is C++, only then followed by C#.
Originally I come from a VB6 background and spent many years on the language. Even with its problems I have always been a defender of VB6 as a comparatively productive business solution platform when evaluated against other languages and tools of the same era. When .NET 1.1 came out I as many others saw VB.NET as a very different animal and learning something new like C# was very attractive. I have not regret this decision and now use C# almost exclusively. (not to say I cant code in VB.NET, I just choose not to)
With Visual Studio 2008's version of VB.NET adding in-line XML enhancement while C# stays "poor" this decision has finally started to mean a real difference based on my language decision. Overall I think its a big mistake for Microsoft to allow such a split as the true interoperability between the two languages outside of syntax (with previously minor exceptions) has been a very effective selling-point of the .NET Framework.
Now adding this statistic to the mix I really question where the competition is going between the two languages. Will there be a point when using VB.NET vs. C# means a large difference in productivity? Is VS 2008 already that time? Only time will tell.
Source Podcast
Overall it was a wonderful interview Podcast, so check it out: Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with Paul Vick and Paul Yuknewicz
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