VB vs. C#

The two big languages in .NET desktop development are VB.NET and C#. Both derive from long-lived and popular language families, and both have had their share of mutual dislike. Not dissimilar to the Capulets and the Montagues. C# has a proud history of hard-core development. It wasn’t that long ago that practically all serious desktop applications for Windows were written in C or C++. Visual Basic on the other hand has always been the softer language, aimed at non-professional programmers.

In the .NET framework the two languages have converged to an uncanny degree. The only real difference between them now is the ability to write unsafe code in C#, which you really oughtn’t be doing in the first place. But functionality isn’t everything. VB and C# were (are?) developed by different teams and they’ve come up with different approaches to similar problems. These differences have become fodder in the up-close war between Basic and C proponents, who now find themselves in uncomfortable proximity to the opposition.

Microsoft itself seems to be pushing C# harder than VB, for whatever reasons. But as my old* boss Andy leBihan pointed out, new programmers will always gravitate more towards VB, simply because it’s called Visual Basic, rather than C Sharp.

I’m not going to argue a position here, I’m happy working with both languages and I try to distribute new projects evenly between them. I started out as a VB programmer (VBScript, then VB5, then VB6, ultimately VB.NET 2005 → 2010) but have been working with C++ and C# for about 6 years now. There are plenty of things I think VB does better and plenty of other things that C# does better. Some of these are intrinsic to the language, others are mere implementation details of the VisualStudio code editor. Here follows a non-exhaustive list:

Things VB does better than C#:

1. Events. Pretty much everything about them. Declaration, adding and removing handlers, raising events. Events are a bloody fucking nightmare in C#.
2. Keywords. I like the self-documenting nature of VB language keywords. It makes them longer, but oh so much more readable. NotInheritable vs. sealed. MustOverride vs. abstract. Inheritable vs. virtual.
3. End constructs. Pretty much all language constructs in C# are delineated by curly brackets. By the time you get to the bottom of a file, it’s not uncommon to see 10 closing brackets in a row. Good luck trying to find which ones mean what. VB uses keywords like End If, Next, Loop, End Function, End Class, End Namespace.
4. Case-Insensitivity. I see no benefit whatsoever in having casing matter. All it can accomplish is confusion and it makes the autocomplete less easy to use.
5. The Like operator. It’s just nice to have wild-card string comparison be so easily accessible.
6. Interface implementations. I prefer the explicit statements for implementing interfaces as well as the suffix marking methods as specific implementations. C# is very muddy in this respect.
7. Select Case is much easier to use than the C# switch construct.

Things C# does better than VB:

1. It leaves scientific notation in code intact. There’s few things more annoying than having your 1e-12 literals automatically replaced with 0.000000000001
2. Square brackets for indexing. VB uses round brackets for both method calls and array/list accessing. Square brackets would have been so much more distinguishable.
3. Separate accessors for getters and setters. It’s not possible to have a public getter and a protected setter in VB. Forcing you to complicate the code with protected methods that kinda sorta look like the getters.
4. Reflection Attributes. The notation is much cleaner in C#.
5. /* …  */ commenting. VB does not allow for comments inside lines of code or for multi-line comments.
6. is and as keywords. Much easier to type and read than TypeOf and TryCast().

As mentioned, this is nowhere near a complete list, however these are my major gripes. Due to the absolute horrid nature of events in C#, I prefer VB while developing GUI intensive applications but for pure code libraries I think C# is the more efficient language, at least once you’ve mastered all the keyword incantations.

* ‘old’ as in ‘no more’, not as in ‘geriatric’