I had a conversation with a friend this morning that somewhat scared me. This friend has been the biggest VB.Net proponent I have ever met. His stance is what has inspired to stand up to "stupid language bigotry" (BTW, this ended in a truce). I have hated how the C# crowd (and other language proponents) has painted VB as a toy language utilitized by a bunch of know nothing "Morts" who have no real business programming. I use OOP methods; I think my methods utilize some decent patterns; and yes, I use VB.Net (at least I do at Version 7.1).
My friend today made this comment, "In Visual Studio 2005, C# is looking better and better." He has many reasons. The first of which is this one on Paul Vick's blog. Default instances (for forms) are being brought into the language, are on by default, and cannot be turned off. Basically a stupid weirdo language construct is being added to VB to make it easier for some (but introducing problematic errors... can you say abiguity issues? I thought you could). All of this is reminiscent of another post I read ala the CodeBetter LinkBlog (from Brendan) that CausticTech Phil wrote about... "More Productive or More moronic."
The main things for those of us who have been doing VB.Net are Generics and Operator Overloading (Yes, I know we're also getting XML Commenting without an addin -- but since I have a free Addin... We're also getting Click Once, but that's not that big of a deal to me... I know there are some other things in the IDE, but Generics and Operator Overloading are the 2 things I care about the most)... BTW, if you are VB6er looking for MS to throw you a bone than look no further than VS2005 (Edit and Continue, the aforementioned default instances -- which raises some concerns for me, scaled down ADO.Net aka ADOLite for those who thought ADO.Net was too large, etc.). In the midst of this, things like refactoring and ObjectSpaces (which was something I wasn't wanting desperately, but it sounded cool) were removed from the table... I think maybe I should whine about the fact that I bought both VS.Net 2002 and VS.Net 2003. I was a VB6er who felt the pain of .Net, but I converted... I left a lot of legacy VB6 behind (or converted when necessary). I did the right thing and this is how I'm rewarded.
Maybe I should convert to C#... Or maybe I should stick with VB.Net as some of those VB6 MVPs start to lose their positions... there may be room for me to rise to that level.