Really cool blog. I really enjoyed reading it. You have really highlighted the cool features of the VB.NET.

Thanks for your feedback. I know VB.NET isn’t for everyone, but I happen to appreciate most of those features.

Indexed Properties – Yes I think it should be avoided. However the VB.NET team had to support this feature as VB 6 had it. I don’t think it’s a horrible idea because it makes working with legacy VB6 and COM applications easier. I agree, it may not be the best idea to use it but it certainly made backwards compatibility easier, and also why C# 4.0 is getting it as well.

Implements – I agree.

Handles – This is just syntactic sugar. You can have the same problem in C# with AutoEventWireup=true but they were still specifically handling the Page.Load using event subscription. It’s no different than calling AddHandler in the constructor, or using += from C#.

ReadOnly / WriteOnly – This is for better supported with interfaces. Since VB.NET does not implement “stub” getters and setters like C# does, the ReadOnly and WriteOnly was how it was decided to be done.

I’m not trying to start a debate, but all of the features have their history and reasons behind all of them. And for the most part, if you don’t like the feature then don’t use it. There are still some quirks to it but I also happen to think Visual Studio’s support for VB.NET is better than C#, assuming you aren’t using a tool like CodeSmith or Resharper.

The “Handles” clause is also horrible. I’ve lost count of the number of times VB ASP.NET developers have posted questions about why their event handlers are being fired three times, usually because they have the handler wired up three times – the markup, the “Handles” clause in the code-behind, and AutoEventWireup=”True” (the default).

The “Implements” clause is another horrible idea. It should only be required for explicit interface implementations; if an interface exposes a Count property and my class implements the interface and exposes a public Count property, why should I have to tell the compiler that my property implements the interface property?

For that matter, why should I have to tell the compiler that a regular property without a Set accessor is ReadOnly, or a property without a Get is WriteOnly? It’s not even a warning, it’s a compiler error! How stupid do the VB compiler team think VB developers are?

Don’t event get me started about the AndAlso/OrElse operators, or array declarations using the upper bound rather than the array size!

VB.NET 10 may have some nice improvements over the previous versions, but I’m still glad I switched to C# back when .NET v1.1 came out.

Dim someNumber = 10

I’m definately looking forward to subs as lambdas.