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What does VB6 have to do with Visual Studio 2010? VB is not the majority .Net language and probably never will be. I've found in my travels through .Net that most people using VB.Net are only doing so because they cling to the VB6 legacy code. C# is the way forward.

I agree. Actually all of the vb.net iterations is not really vb in any shape or form, except in name. Microsoft realized that due to how many developers who do not use vb.net and stuck to the real vb, vb6.

There is one big problem in vb6 that always killed me. You can change as much code as you want while at a breakpoint. You can even move your 'next execution' line anywhere and it will use the new code, BUT you can never save the changes until you stop running your code. I could develop a whole app while in debug but if vb crashed, you lost everything.

when moving to VS.NET you lose a lot of conveniences that non VB programmers will never understand how great they were but it is so much more powerful. just make the jump.

Edited 2009-05-20 09:26 UTC

I agree. They should have never re-did it, just buried it. Any "true" version of VB must be:

1. inelegant
2. cumbersome
3. incapable of extending itself significantly
4. syntactically awkward
5. pointlessly verbose
6. internally inconsistent

VB.NET is STILL all of those (well except for 3). You will probably hate me for saying it, but its the truth - the only way to fix VB is to kill it - it was born ugly and should have been put down a long time ago. Its beyond all hope of repair. It is the perfect example of a product that became successful in spite of itself.

If you want to go "old school" and use a product that is very much like VB, but without the brain damage, Borland Delphi is a pretty good. It is all that VB could have been and more.

But its 2009. Pre-dotnet VB is dead. I still mourn Delphi, but sadly it is dead also (MS basically bought it from Borland in the form of all of its developers thus killing it through attrition).

I would recommend learning python or ruby if you like languages with simpler, less C-like syntax, but the best language for truly getting your head around the .NET framework is C# - it is the reference implementation - and it should be learned FIRST. And step one of learning C# for a former VB developer should be to forget everything and start over - you essentially learned on a language that did virtually _everything_ wrong and you will need to do ALOT of unlearning.

Anyone using python, ruby, etc. on .NET should be doing it for the right reasons - and you cant know the right reasons if you don't first conquer C#. Same goes for Java on the JRE. The key is learning the framework and the runtime, and the best language to learn those things on is the reference language.