Re: Is VB.NET dead?

herbert wrote:
Dear VB.NET Team,

you did a wonderful job in making VB.NET a full fledged language, at least on the compiler side. When teaching students I always see that solving labs using VB.NET gives a faster result than C#.

However the "distribution chain" to your customers is totally wrecked:
I bought five WCF books in the last months, none of them contains VB.NET samples. Nor does any of the source code websites I visited lately.
(M.L. Bustamente just shipped a subset of samples in VB.NET, yet her book does not use it).

The Problem:
VB.NET programmers spend/waste considerable time translating code snippets and samples by figuring out how to translate nitty gritty C# features which are not available in VB.NET into working code.
I even have a book by Chris Sells (Programming Windows Forms 2.0) who wrote me that one of his sample cannot be converted to VB.NET without redesign.

I understand that you have no influence over the publishers like o'Reilly or Wrox. However

1) you have full access to the publication pipeline of MS-Press (yes: the WCF books of MS-Press just ignore VB.NET!) So why does MS-Press ignore VB.NET ?

2) All the books are written by authors who are more or less in close proximity to Microsoft: Juwal Löwy, M.L. Bustamente all make their money consulting MSFT technologies. So please talk to them!

So for all book writers, speakers at conferences etc: give them a paper what to avoid in C# in order to make reading for VB.NET guys easier.

(and keep on rewriting the VB.NET online help samples so that they don't look like auto-converted C#: there is a For...Each in VB.NET!)

thank you very much
no code no glory!
herbert

The OpenSource .NET programming IDE SharpDevelop has a feature which allows you translate quickly code snippets from C# to VB and vice versa with the click of a button.

Another possibility would be you could compile the code sample and then you can use the freeware program Reflector to export the compiled code into VB.NET (You can chose any language you want).
.