VB + C# Adventures (Part 1)

I’ll be starting a new series documenting my experiences with using VB and C# simultaneously.  This isn’t meant to be a comparison between the languages, but rather just a non-technical (as can be anyway) dump of the things that are going through my head as I use both languages.  I’m sure this has been done before, but this ought to be fun anyway.

Some personal background…

Back when I was in college, I learned C++ as my first language.  Of course there was some minor SPARC assembly (like I really remember any of that…) and later Java as required by whichever classes I was taking.  I had extremely light exposure to VB6 in my senior year in one of my design classes.  We did UML diagrams and we tied it into a VB skeleton with absolutely no requirement to write any code.  I literally wrote zero lines of VB code in that class.

My first professional job was at a mortgage company and the environment was VB6.  It didn’t take long for me to get adjusted, but I found VB6 a little odd as it went against most of the guiding principles I learned in college as to how to write a program.  Anyway, I’m not going to jump onto the “bash VB” train because that train is full…

Since VB6 was on my resume, my proceeding jobs were also related to me using VB6.  I didn’t mind it, but at the same time I wasn’t really learning anything new… I guess you can say that I started getting bored. 

Fast forward to my current job.  When I first started here, I had zero professional experience with .NET.  I’ve always wanted to get into it, but opportunities seemed slim for me given that I had no professional experience in .NET (catch 22…, but it’s worse for game developers).  I did do some studying on my own in C#, but I wasn’t about to lie and say that I had real-world .NET experience.  I was very fortunate to come across a job listing for my current position and also for the fact that Greg gave me a shot.

Jumping from VB6 to VB.NET wasn’t difficult.  I guess it was because I had retained some of the objected-oriented knowledge from college and the syntax between the two wasn’t too different.  I was (and still am) excited to learn something new for a change.  So far, doing things in C# isn’t too difficult for me.  I had some prior experience with C-style syntax already and I know the .NET framework from doing things in VB.NET already.

I feel that a good carpenter can build a great house with any brand of tools you give them.  The same holds true in the case of a good .NET developer (or any developer for that matter).  A good or bad developer will be a good or bad developer regardless of what language they are using.  This is why I really don’t understand the C# snobbery I see a lot of.  Both languages have their pros and cons, but in the end it’s the result that matters.