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by Paul Vick.
Original Post: Should I move from VB6 to VB .NET or C#?
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TechEd 2004 was crazy busy, so there's going to be some catch up time before I get back into full swing blogging. However, one thing I did want to relate before I forget it.
Last night, Duncan Mackenzie, Amanda Silver, Steven Lees and I (the middle two are VB Program Managers) were having dinner at TechEd and we started discussing the logic of a statement made by several customers during the conference that boiled down to: “We figured that since VB .NET wasn't the same as VB6, we might as well move to C# when we moved to .NET“ After thinking about this for a moment, it occured to me that this is somewhat akin to saying:
“We figured that since British English wasn't the same as American English, we might as well learn German when we moved to Europe.”
I mean, it's a free country and all, but the logic of this does seem a little, well, illogical. Although the two languages can do many of the same things and have many similarities, taking on the extra burden of doing the cultural retraining necessary to move from VB to C# without some kind of well-researched rationale seems to me to be doing a whole lot of work that you don't really need to. VB .NET adds a lot of power to VB and tweaks a few familiar things, but it's still substantially the same language, just in the same way that British, American, Canadian and Australian English are all the same language, even if three out of four insist on using “u“s in funny places. (Although on the plane ride back, I got stumped on a crossword because I wrote in “lustre“ rather than “luster.“ I guess I watched too many British shows on PBS growing up.)
The way of the world, I guess, but it doesn't make sense to me...
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