I have'nt been developing with .Net yet but...

When I do It'll be C#.

1) I wanted to point out ECMA too but Leland was faster. That is not important. The important thing is that you got the information. So probably fast enough to save you from the VB .net (dead-end) route ;-)

2) IBM made an agreement some time ago with Borland to provide C# tools for DB2 use.

http://www7b.software.ibm.com/dmdd/zones/borland/


Now perhaps the big question should be "Why did MS made another development language when VB is already there?"

They probably did'nt do it because they felt it would be fun. Usually a new programming language is made out of a need.

BASIC (Beginner's all puspose symbolic instruction code)
COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language)
ForTran (Formula Translator)

So why would C# be there if VB is doing the job right?

I don't buy the argument that C# was created so that we could choose the development language that we prefer. Since when MS is doing something to please developers?

Before answering don't forget that we had to wait until version 8 of VFP to have the auto-increment field.

So to me it's probably the other way around. VB.Net is an evolution of VB and was created because MS did'nt want to upset it's VB developers base. For a while VB's crowd is supported. At least they'll be able to get on the .Net bandwagon and learn a lot about .Net until MS decides to drop VB in favor of C#. At that point the marketing gurus will probably think of a cool way to get VB developers to jump to C#.


>Thank you Leland - great points!
>
>Tom
>
>
>>Hi Thomas,
>>
>>C# and the CLI (e.g. Common Language Infrastructure) have been turned over to ECMA as an international standard, see below link:
>>
>>http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/
>>
>>There are a number of dot net implementations. C# and the CLI are a lot like java in that java could be written and then run on all platforms within its Java Virtual Machine (e.g. JVM) Each OS needed its own implementation of the JVM to run the java app on the selected platform. Dot Net works just like java in that respect.
>>
>>Since C# and CLI are standardized, an app written in C# should be capable of running across operating systems.
>>
>>There are many current projects underway to build the .Net layer above the OS/s that is needed to run dot net ADO.NET, etc applications. One such project is mono that is being developed by the Linux Community. Borland is coming out with its version of Visual Studio NET. It is reasonable to assume at some point Borland may port their development tool to other platforms.
>>
>>I know that an app written in C# would be supported on all platforms that comply with C# and CLI standards, but I wonder if an app written in VB.NET for example would port to mono, or be support in the mono's window version of net, for example.
>>
>>Just to be safe and keep my options opened, I would go with C#.
>>
>>If you want to have the option of intraoperability, I would check with the mono project to see if its implementation of NET support the same 20 or so languages that Microsoft's version supports.
>>
>>
>>LelandJ