My experiences with VB.NET...

For the past four months I been involved in a project where we exclusively developed in VB.NET. This is the most time I have ever spent in this language, and in the end, I would have to say my overall experience was decidedly average.

To me C# just seems more natural, it is somewhat simpler and certainly a lot less verbose. There are some really annoying things with VB.NET, the following being my highlights (main peeves):

• And vs AndAlso and Or vs OrElse – why would you ever want the former, apart from bitwise, yet that is not the default?
• DirectCast(value, type) – versus just casting (type)value; simpler, more obvious.
• Dim – how annoying; it is not even consistent as it is not required for class declarations.
• Public readonly property Name as Type – that’s a mouthful, surely the compiler could determine by looking at whether both a get and set have been defined.
• End – ending everything, bring on the {}.
• Auto formatting – sometimes I want my code to look one way, but “no” the IDE comes along and makes it look another
• Visual basic .NET compiler system error &hc0000005& after a VSS Get Latest - nearly every friggin day! Close VS.NET, cross your fingers, restart and hope for the best – works again first time about 50% of the time.
• VB.NET 1.1 XML comments – why was this missing – hello? Thank you VBCommenter from GotDotNet.
• Nothing vs Null – couldn’t we keep it the same between the languages; so if a parameter is nothing an ArgumentNullException is thrown – huh?

I am sure there are more, but that is all I could come up with for now.