What in C#.NET makes it more suitable for some projects than VB.NET?
Performance?, Capabilities?, Libraries/Components?, Reputation?, Reliability? Maintainability?, Ease?
Basically anything C# can do, that is impossible using VB, or vice versa. Things you just have to consider when choosing C#/VB for a project.
In early versions of VB.NET, the difference was more obvious, however with the current version, there are no significant differences.
VB supports XML literals directly in code, which is not supported by C#. C# supports unsafe code and VB don't. Technically these two are the biggest differences. There are many small variations but they are not important. I like C# more because I think the syntax is much less bloated. It's easy to recognize the blocks of code instead of seeing a bunch of keywords, but that's a pure personal preference.
Choose the one you and your team are more familiar with.
C# and VB are basically the same however there are some minor differences. Aside from the obvious grammar differences you have the following differences:
C#'s syntax follow a similar grammar to c and java, which make it a much more comfortable transition from those languages, where as VB can be more comfortable to VB users. As far performance, and libraries or components they are nearly identical.
As for which one to choose, unless you have a need to do unsafe operations, then choose the language which is most natural to you. After years of being a VB developer I loved not having to write If yadada then.....End If if (yadaya){....} saves my carpal tunnel a few extra keystrokes (Which can then be used on answering SO questions)
Just learned one more difference btw C# and VB is that VB supports filtered exceptions so you could something like this pseudo:
try
{
//do something that fails
}
catch(Exception ex when ArgumentException,
ArgumentNullException, FormatException)
{
//Only handle these three types
}
This should not be confused with the ability to do:
try
{
//something that fails
}
catch(ArgumentException)
{
//Log Error
}
catch(ArgumentNullException)
{
//Log Error
}
In this case you are going to handle the exceptions differently in the VB world you could define one piece of code to handle multiple types of Exceptions.
Some more differences.
c#
if (foo is FooObject){}
vb
If TypeOf foo is FooObject then
As I understand it, there are differences between the languages though they are minimal. I would suggest working with the language that you/your developers would feel most comfortable with. If they already have VB experience then I'd suggest VB.Net/vice-versa.
Though I prefer the terse syntax of C# personally. :)
Since C# and VB.Net both compile into MSIL, both have nearly identical Performance, Capabilities, Libraries and Components. Reflection can deassemble MSIL code into either C# or VB.NET (or a number of other languages)
This basically leaves us with, C# looks a lot like Java and C++ which gives it more credibility.
My favorite feature of C# that VB doesn't have is the yield statement. It lets you easily return an lazily evaluated IEnumerable from a method.
Here is an article that covers it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163970.aspx
Street cred among geeks.
(And don't pretend that's not important!)
I think this blog post by Kathleen Dollard provides an excellent overview to the question:
What a C# Coder Should Know Before They Write VB
and her first advice is:
1) Get over the respect thing or quit before you start. VB is a great language.
I think Josh gave a good rollup on the language differences.
Tooling Support
There are however also differences in how Visual Studio handles these languages. Code Snippets are easier to use from the C# editor and the refactoring is better also.
The VB-editor simplifies intellisense by not showing all options at all times.
I'm sure there are more things, but those are the ones that I as a C#'er (doing very little VB) have noticed.
for the moment VB.Net has a very poor implementation of lambda expressions. Meaning that you can't do the neat things that you can in C#. Well you can, but it needs a very ugly workaround in most cases.
This is solved in VB.Net 10.0.
VB has a better feedback on errors. In C# you have to compile more often to get all the errors in your syntax.
VB.Net has a root namespace and C# has a default namespace which is not the same. Because when you have a root namespace in VB.Net it will always add that before the namespace.
For example: if you have a rootnamepsace in VB.Net named namespace1 and then you add this to your file.
Namespace namespace1
Public Class class1
End Class
End Namespace
then you will have to refer to it as namespace1.namespace1.class1
in C# if you have a default namespace called namespace1 and you this in your file.
namespace namespace1{
public class class1{}
}
Then you can still just refer to it as namespace1.class1
Others have covered a lot of the differences - as has been said several times, they're nearly equivalent languages. A few differences which haven't been covered as far as I've seen:
VB9 has:
C# 3 has:
I suspect there is more, but I thought I'd just throw those into the mix.
In C# you can have more fine tuned control over events/delegates. But you rarely need this.
There are a lot more code examples for C#.
In VB.Net it is (a lot) easier to use late binding. For example to COM objects (in C# from version 4.0).
As soon as I know F# better, I will probably use it for the parts that F# is better suited for.
Performance?
No difference, though VB historically uses a weird indexing in loops which means that you have to subtract 1 from the highest index most of the time:
For i = 0 To someArrayOrString.Length - 1 …
Though I doubt this impacts performance in any measurable way.
On the other hand, due to background compilation, VB actually compiles seemingly faster. Some people claim that this makes the IDE react sluggishly but I've never noticed that myself.
Capabilities?
In a few instances, C#'s yield statement is really useful. VB requires more manual work here. Also, lambdas are much better implemented in C#, especially syntactically. Consider these two statements:
Parallel.For(1, 10000, i => {
// Do something
});
versus
Parallel.For(1, 10000, Sub() _
' Do something '
End Sub)
Besides the fact that VB can't do this yet, and that a comment at this place is forbidden, it's just more clutter and generally a no-go.
Libraries/Components?
Identical.
Reputation?
Not important. “Street cred”? Sorry. Not a factor. Get over it, Nick.
Reliability? Maintainability? Ease?
More or less identical. I claim that VB is easier but that may be biased and in any way, it's only marginal.
The big advantage i see with C# is that the vast majority of open source projects, sample code and blog snippets are written in C#. Although it’s easy to convert these to VB.NET with tools (or your head) it is still a monotonous task for VB devs (like me).
Even if you write in VB.NET day to day, you will still need to be able to read C#
Technically, they share the same framework with same performance and memory characteristics and same type systems, so I find it hard to hard to split the two.
Most good developers should be able to shift between the two with a few days adjustment time.
My core frustaration lies with the hundreds of time I have written:
String lastName as String
and wondered why it never compiles!
When you hit a problem, you'll often be able to Google for a code sample that shows how to solve it in minutes. This is a significant factor in improving productivity. When I was working with Delphi, I had to convert code samples from C into Object Pascal - doable, but tedious, i.e. lots of friction. So don't underestimate the fact that...
The vast majority of .Net code samples are in C# !
Here is another point not yet covered in this trail:
Higher Degree of Employability + Better (more) Dev Resources
Now I don’t agree with this point of view however:
There are more C# dev shops that VB shops
Some backward c# employers will put you at a serious disadvantage if you are stronger with VB. So maybe C# is the better choice here.
On the flip side, when you go to hire people for your C# project, you will be able to attract more candidates to iterview and get better skills as a result – I don't think detail should be overlooked.
I have to say it's been my experience when using Google to search for examples or documentation that C# examples are of better quality than VB examples. This isn't to say that there aren't bad C# examples, but if you search for something like "dictionary drop down" adding C# will provide a better quality answer higher on the list.
This doesn't apply to examples that display both C# and VB code side by side.
Free from old cruft, array declaration in C# is not padded with extra element. VB.NET array is padded with extra element, so legacy VB6 code migration is easier.
C# is more consistent than VB.NET
Button1.Color() = Color.Red
Button1.Color = Color.Red
I can't give an answer when one student asked me when to use parenthesis on properties of VB.NET. It's hard to give an insightful reasoning for this kind of misfeature.
Consistency with instance and static members. VB.NET allows accessing static members on instance e.g. yarn.Sleep(1000), this is a misfeature. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/312419/language-features-you-should-never-use