Updated: December 14, 2020 (December 14, 2020)

  Analyst Report

Visual Basic Won’t Evolve; C#, F# Updated

My Atlas / Analyst Reports

589 wordsTime to read: 3 min
Rob Sanfilippo by
Rob Sanfilippo

Before joining Directions on Microsoft, Rob worked at Microsoft for 14 years where he designed technologies for Microsoft products and... more

  • Visual Basic is essentially deprecated but is supported with .NET 5.0.
  • Organizations with Visual Basic codebases should be prepared to migrate code to a new programming language, although it is not immediately necessary.
  • C# 9.0 and F# 5.0, the newest versions of those programming languages, arrived alongside .NET 5.0.

A Mar. 2020 announcement stated that Microsoft “does not plan to evolve” the Visual Basic (VB) programming language, although its latest version is supported by .NET 5.0, which was released in Nov. 2020.

Visual Basic Basically Deprecated

.NET, a set of class libraries (APIs) and a run-time engine for so-called managed code application implementations, supports several programming languages. C#, the most popular, was designed specifically to target .NET, while VB, which existed prior to .NET, was substantially revised in 2002 to work with the platform.

C# and VB have minor syntax differences, but both have received new versions at about the same time for nearly two decades, delivering mostly equivalent capabilities. VB has maintained a significant developer base despite the popularity of C#.

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