VB and C# considerations for VFP developers

A few weeks ago, there was a thread on the Universal Thread asking which .NET language VFP developers should select for those interested in learning and using .NET, primarily those VFP developers adding .NET to their programming skill set. I received positive feedback from my UT reply post, so I thought I'd re-post it here on my blog:

The VB team and the C# team have different goals and focuses in some areas. C# focuses more on the pureness of the language and avoiding language bloat (fewer commands, more object based syntax, etc.). Most C# developers prefer writing their own source code to things rather than using libraries or higher level language commands that do things for them. The VB team is focused more in productivity, ease of use, ease of discovery, and higher level language features. VB 2005 has My dot making access to many .NET Framework and common features very easy and fast to use/discover, etc., plus many more code snippets for common actions/functions. The VB team likes the idea of query language embedded into VB to be more like what developers already know in SQL Server (SQL language, VFP, etc), while C# views it more like an object syntax into an API and lower level. There are some XML related features being planned for future VB that are much like TEXT MERGE in VB, and this is something that may not be in C# for example. The goal of the C# and VB teams are not to match feature for feature nor to match syntax, but instead to focus on their core audience of developers which has some divergence.

In some cases, it may be that a C# developer uses VB for some components (maybe data querying for example) and simply embeds the various components into one solution (meaning, some written in VB and some in C#). Some of the VFP team developers including Calvin Hsia and Aleksey Tsingauz (Aleksey wrote the CursorAdapter, XMLAdapter, SQL language enhancements to VFP 9.0, new data-types in the VFP engine, etc.) are helping the VB team with the future data-centric programming features like referencing the VFP 9.0 C++ code base for LINQ query functions, SQL language implementation, etc. as well as making the IntelliSense in VB with data a first class experience. Many of the Sedna components (the ones that use .NET via interop) will be written in VB (mostly code name VB 9.0, the version after VB 2005) with the new data/LINQ features. Alan Griver and I have been talking about these .NET language divergence issues for over 3 years now, and only until recently have the differences been more noticeable (ie, data-programming differential). More information is available online about future versions of .NET programming.