At my new job I’ve gotten to play around a lot with .Net technologies, and I must say, I’m pretty impressed. I started programming with Visual Basic 3.0 when I was in high school, so I was very interested to take a look at Visual Basic .Net. My initial impression is that it’s very cool. While it differs significantly from version 6.0, there’s enough similarities.

Then I took a look at C#, and I liked that much better. C# also allows you to do drag-and-drop user interface design, just like Visual Basic. Then it occured to me: C# and Visual Basic .Net are actually the same, differing only in syntax. All of the concepts and user interface designer are exactly the same. Leads me to wonder why they even bothered with Visual Basic .Net. I’m sure part of the decision was not to alienate the version 6.0 developers and force them to learn a language that is much different.

Really, Visual Basic 6.0 was pretty limited and had a lot of things going on behind the scenes that prevented you from doing a lot of powerful things. Visual Basic .Net is much more verbose, but it exposes so much more of the functionality that its predecessor without changing the syntax too much. However, I find that I prefer C# because its syntax is more succint and more like Java, JavaScript, and C. Looks like I may be investing in C# for my personal use to start getting back into making Windows applications.