lectricpharaoh

My guess is to maintain some level of source-code compatibility with older versions of VB that may have required it.

Of course, I might be wrong here; I only have the version of VB in Visual Studio.NET 2003, so I'm not sure what was or was not required in other versions.

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Ooble

Well, any VB6 code would be incompatible with VB .NET without a converter anyway... perhaps it's just so they didn't annoy people.

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bl00dninja

i agree with lectricpharaoh and ooble. if you're gonna dink with the syntax of vb.NET that much, why not just use C#?

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Rory

The whole point about BASIC is it's english-like syntax, being an almost direct translation of the pseudocode produced as part of the development process, and now achieves almost Haskell-levels of code-writing efficiency whilst producing a viable end result, which is what makes it so useful as a RAD tool. Even the most powerful languages can't compete with VB's inbuilt readability.

I agree with bloodninja - if someone wanted to use C#, well they'd be using it.

Ghost

Rory, take a look at c#, its pretty close to vb.net and in my 'opinion' has more power because of certain features that it has the vb does not. Then again, vb has a few little features that are kind of nice too....looks like there is a reason for both, but if you are going to debate the reasoning for something in vb that makes it more like c# and say that c# is nothing like vb....i dunno, just doesnt sound right to me.

*I know my comment doesnt make a lot of sense easily, but it wouldn't be programming if it was easy

lectricpharaoh

I haven't downloaded the 2005 beta, but I'm running VS.NET 2003 on a 366mhz P2 with 128 megs of RAM. It's okay for the most part, though a tad slow when starting up or loading the documentation for certain functions (especially when filtering by language).

However, I grabbed the demo version of Rational XDE the other day (I can't stand Rational Rose, but we gotta use that shit for my CASE/4GL class), and talk about sloooow. I made an empty solution, stuck some empty projects in it, added a single class to one of them, and then did a 'synchronize' operation. Took about a half hour for it to make the damn UML diagram. I could have gone outside and pissed in the snow, and made it faster.

My solution, then, is to do all the code, and make the diagrams at school, where they have decent machines.

I'm pretty sure you can turn off the autoformatting stuff that the IDE does for you. I find that in VB at least, it's nice to leave on, as it keeps the code looking consistent, and I can be lazy with capitalization, etc. Sure, it's annoying sometimes, but it seems to be more helpful than annoying.

Wanna know what I find annoying? It's when your program throws an uncaught exception at runtime, and you have this tiny window you cannot resize, and you have to scroll like a frickin' madman to read the call trace.

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A man's knowledge is like an expanding sphere, the surface corresponding to the boundary between the known and the unknown. As the sphere grows, so does its surface; the more a man learns, the more he realizes how much he does not know. Hence, the most ignorant man thinks he knows it all. - L. Sprague de Camp