Visual Basic and VB.NET

Visual Basic .NET, VB.NET, is a backwards-incompatible redesign of Visual Basic to Microsoft's .NET platform. Almost all of the above criticisms have been addressed with many of the missing features added. VB.NET has support for threading, advanced object oriented code, and Try-Catch-Finally blocks.

Many new features (mainly from the .NET framework) have also appeared, like remoting, web services, 64-bit integers and ADO.NET. VB.NET is also a fully-compiled language (as opposed to previous versions which could both compile and interpret the language).

Programs require compilation even if the program is only to be debugged. This resulted in a number of convenient features being removed from Visual Basic, including the quick execution of programs, and the famous edit-and-continue feature (this feature has been restored in Visual Basic 2005).

Visual Basic 2005 also includes the "MY" namespace, which gives the developer a vast amount of commonly used functionality. Note: Microsoft has officially dropped the ".net" within the Visual Studio product name for 2005. Many of the original critics of Visual Basic now praise VB.NET for providing a "complete" language, while a few supporters of Visual Basic claim VB.NET has made the language too complicated and too hard to use for simple application development. Another criticism of VB.NET is the incompatibility and lack of similarity in syntax.

VB.NET provides a wizard to help upgrade code, but many features are not converted properly. The wizard produces a list of places in the code where the upgrade is incomplete, and large projects have many thousands of such places requiring significant programmer time to complete the upgrade. In particular the Variant data type, which was the default data type is no longer supported. It is replaced by the Object type.

Programs written in VB.NET must be manually converted to VB6 code if this is desired. Some critics believe VB.NET support will diminish, with C# becoming the preferred language for .NET programming. However both languages compile to .NET Common Intermediate Language.

With the releases of the 2002, 2003 and 2005 versions of Visual Studio, Microsoft has re-affirmed support for Visual Basic. Starting with Tech Ed 2001 [2], Bill Gates "called attention to the significance of the 10th anniversary of Microsoft® Visual Basic® , the world's most widely used programming language." Currently, C# programmers must include the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace to access the very powerful "My" class.