InfoQ Homepage Visual Basic.NET Content on InfoQ
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Microsoft Quietly Updates .NET Language Strategy
On February 6th 2023, Kathleen Dollard, principal program manager on .NET team at Microsoft, posted an update of the .NET language strategy. The new document is a continuation of the same ideas from the previous one, written in 2017, where C# and F# are the evolving languages and VB.NET is a niche language.
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Mercury Brings Visual Basic to Feature Parity with C# and Adds Multiple Platform Support
RemObjects Mercury refreshes Visual Basic for .NET by adding support for current .NET features while also making it available for more platforms, including WebAssembly, iOS, Android, and Linux.
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Visual Basic 16.9 in .NET 5
Since the The .NET Language Strategy was published in 2017, the general belief in the .NET community was that Visual Basic was effectively a dead language. But Microsoft has been quietly working on extending the life of the language.
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Visual Basic’s File IO Added to .NET Core
Visual Basic’s File IO library is being ported to .NET Core 3.0. This includes convenience functions such as the ability to copy or delete a directory with one function call, support for the Windows recycle bin (without p/invoke code), and an RFC compliant CSV parser that can also handle fixed-width files.
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.NET Core 2 Brings Visual Basic to Linux and macOS
Microsoft has moved closer towards bringing Visual Basic into place as a first-class citizen on the .NET Core platform. As part of the .NET Core 2 release, VB developers can now write code that targets .NET Standard 2.0, increasing the deployment platforms available. Importantly, this means the same executable or library that runs on Windows can work on macOS and Linux.
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.NET Core 2.0 Preview Released, Includes Visual Basic Support
Microsoft has announced the release of .NET Core 2 Preview 1. This brings .NET Core into compliance with .NET Standard 2 and adds Visual Basic support to .NET Core for the first time.
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New Language Features in Visual Basic 15
Visual Basic 15 brings with it partial implementations of two important C# features: tuples and ref returns. Neither feature is “complete”, but they do offer enough work-arounds that VB applications can consume C# libraries that make use of these features.
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Visual Basic: The Road Ahead
Microsoft has announced some major changes to how it will treat Visual Basic in the future. Representing the first major change in the company's approach in six years, Visual Basic will now be free to diverge from C#.
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Microsoft's Plans for the Future of .NET
Microsoft develops C#, Visual Basic, and F# in public but doesn't always share its plans for these popular languages. Mads Torgersen has provided some new guidance on where Microsoft plans to take these languages in the future.
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How Node Replaced Macros in Microsoft Word
Writing extensions for Word used to be handled by BASIC. Now, the language of choice is JavaScript and the platform Node.
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Code Aware Libraries with Roslyn
Code Aware Libraries are “libraries that provide guidance on correct use through embedded tooling and operates on the user’s code in real time.”
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Visual Basic: Back by Popular Demand
Once again, Visual Basic has been brought back from the brink of deprecation. Reversing a previous decision, VB will be fully supported in ASP.NET 5 including cross-platform.
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Microsoft Embraces GitHub for their .NET Compilers
Microsoft is continuing their move from CodePlex to GitHub for their open source offerings. The F# compiler was moved on the 13th, with the Roslyn based C# and VB compilers following a few days later.
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Updated Feature List for C# 6 and VB 12
As the next version of C# gets closer, features that are not quite ready have to be cut. The features. Newly removed from the list are primary constructors and declaration expressions.
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Pattern Matching in C# and VB
Another concept from functional programming languages making its way to C# and VB is what’s known as pattern matching. At first glance pattern matching looks like a switch/select block, but it is much more powerful.