We are changing from vs2003 to vs2005 and use vb as our primary language, I am looking for some of the changes to VB that will be helpful in our ASP.NET development. Can someone point me to a list (maybe from microsoft?) or provide some of their favaorite differences between the two versions?
+1
A:
I found the biggest improvements from .Net 1.1 to 2.0 were generics and yield return for easy implementation of ienumerables.
Mendelt
2008-10-17 14:11:50
+5
A:
WHOA! Not so fast there, buddy! What's the rush? Relax, guy. Give it a few more years.
Any .NET developer not working version 3.5 of the framework is just wasting time. Every single bit of it... Linq, WPF, lambdas, WCF, GENERICS, I could go on... Every SINGLE bit of it is gold. I'd rather play on a highway than target 1.1. Its like night and day.
Do yourself and your team a favor... Skip 2k5 and hit 2k8.
Will
2008-10-17 14:12:13
Any advancement is positive, organizational inertia can be a pain. I'm still fighting to get colleagues to stop using VB6.
Greg D
2008-10-17 14:21:11
Organizational inertia in this case is costing developer productivity. And the majority of money brought into my shop is from vb6 apps, as well.
Will
2008-10-17 14:24:14
generics are in 2.0.
Joel Coehoorn
2008-10-17 14:39:32
I agree with the 3.5 statement, unfortunately there is no money to go that far, we already have the vs2005 licenses but have no vs2008 ones and finance dept is unwilling to foot the bill to upgrade
WACM161
2008-10-17 14:41:37
Yes, generics are in 2.0. I didn't mean to imply you had to go to 2008 to get 'em.
Will
2008-10-17 15:43:27
+4
A:
From a language perspective, the addition of Generics and Nullable types (second link) (built on Generics) was a pretty compelling story for my work. The My namespace provides VB developers with quite a few shortcuts into "somewhat" more complicated features of the system.
From an ASP.NET perspective, even though they weren't VB-specific, the addition of the Master Page framework and MembershipProvider architecture were also very valuable.
Here's a fairly comprehensive list from Microsoft of all the Visual Studio 2005, language and major .NET framework changes.
For what it's worth, you might consider just jumping over 2005 and right into 2008, with .NET 3.5.
John Rudy
2008-10-17 14:15:43
+3
A:
Rick Strahl takes stock of the major changes and provides a personal perspective on some of the highs and lows.
notandy
2008-10-17 14:19:51
A:
I personally find some of the IDE changes to be of the best benefit.
- The fact that the designer DOESN'T re-format your code as it feels like it
- The fact that standard layout is DEFAULT rather than grid layout
- Improvements in intellesence
In addition to the IDE changes, if I had to pick 1 .NET 2.0 thing that is a huge helper I would say generics.
Mitchel Sellers
2008-10-17 14:33:43