Most Wanted Features for Visual Basic 10.0

Question

In the vein of Most Wanted Feature for C# 4.0, what would you like to see in the next version of VB.NET?

Answer 1

Anonymous Methods, like C# instead of statement lambdas only.

Answer 2

curly brackets.

I'll get my coat.......... :)

Answer 3

F#'s units of measure system, as language feature

Answer 4

It is more of a .NET addition but, Java style Enums.

Answer 5

Two categories.

C# catchup

• An analog for C#'s yield keyword
• An analog for C#'s better nullable type support
• Auto properties
• unsafe code

New features

• Multiple setters for properties (IE: you could have a Uri property that lets you have separate setters that accept a Uri type and a String type, and it uses the type inference system to know which you mean to use. Of course, the setter would have to know how to convert the passed string and store it in the Uri backing the property)
• Real String enums
• Multi-line statements (ie, You can start any line with a semi-colon, which is ignored except that then the statement does not end until the parser reaches another semi-colon). It would be great for long string literals, for example, or for multi-line lambdas/delegates.

Answer 6

Anonymous Delegates

EDIT: Changed to reflect updated information.

Answer 7

From some other threads:

• Automatic properties
• Collection initializers

… both will hopefully be implemented.

Answer 8

a verbatim string literal character like c# (@) so we don't have to constantly escape those pesky regexes.

Answer 9

A few more:

• Remove the need to use _ line continuation when adding attributes to classes/methods on the line above.
• The ability to include linebreaks in string literals without having to concat to Environment.NewLine or vbCrLf (much too verbose for my tastes as is)

Answer 10

I just want an old feature from VB6 that was dropped...

You used to be able to create a UI with several controls with the same name and they would become an array. I miss that.

(Yes, I know that you can do basically the same thing by dynamically creating a UI and put all of your controls in a collection, but you can't do it visually in the Drag-and-Drop UI editor, so creating these is a PIA.)

Answer 11

My wishlist:

• Support for multi-statement lambdas. I want to be able to create a lambda expression that has multiple statements in it.
• Remove the limitation that all lambdas must be "Function"s so that I can write lambdas for Action() (or Action) parameters.
• Always show "References" node in Solution Explorer (instead of having to enabled the "Show All Files" option)