I spent the last few weeks using VB, and I kept thinking things such as “Wow, this is really awesome, I wish all other languages had that!” or “I’m sure there is an easier way to do this”. I simply can’t help it – just as with any other language, when I start using it I notice a few things that are really cool, and a few things that can be improved.<\/p>\n
So, I had my very own list of what was really cool and what could be better, but then I wondered – how did other VB developers feel? And, what is a better way to answer a question like this than actually asking the community? Why not put a blog post and see what people think about the VB IDE\/language features? <\/p>\n
To make things really simple, I prepared two questions for you: And then if we take everyone’s $200 and add these numbers together, we will get a pretty accurate picture of what we are doing right and we could do even better. So, help us do our job better!<\/p>\n Just as an example, here is my answer to the first question. I tried to keep the list as short as possible, but there are some things that I really wanted to mention, so I couldn’t make it shorter than that \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Preserving current functionality: So, what are your lists?<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I spent the last few weeks using VB, and I kept thinking things such as “Wow, this is really awesome, I wish all other languages had that!” or “I’m sure there is an easier way to do this”. I simply can’t help it – just as with any other language, when I start using it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":260,"featured_media":8818,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,195],"tags":[139],"class_list":["post-5633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-visual-basic","tag-slavi-marinov"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":" I spent the last few weeks using VB, and I kept thinking things such as “Wow, this is really awesome, I wish all other languages had that!” or “I’m sure there is an easier way to do this”. I simply can’t help it – just as with any other language, when I start using it […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/260"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
1. If you had $100 to spend on keeping existing VB features unmodified, how would you spend it?<\/strong>
2. If you had $100 to spend on adding new things to VB \/ improving existing functionality, how would you spend it?<\/strong><\/p>\n
<\/strong>– $40 – Ubiquity. I can use VB to create Web apps, Windows Forms apps, Smart Device apps, MS Office scripts, etc. You can learn one language and pretty much do anything with it – that is really the best part about VB to me!
– $30 – Really smart Intellisense and instant feedback while I’m writing code – I can see syntax errors without explicitly compiling my project. I just love that!
– $20 – My! Yesterday I had to write a small script and I don’t really think I could have written less code in any other language. My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllText, My.Computer.Network.DownloadFile, My.Computer.FileSystem.SpecialDirectories.MyDocuments, etc. – just a few of the really, really<\/strong> cool things in My.
– $10 – The “dynamic” part of the language and the syntactic sugar – implicit late binding, optinal parameters, with…end with, etc. It makes a huge difference!<\/p>\n