><snip>
>>... One of the most interesting reader's comment is from James. He mentions that being case-sensitive is an advantage of C# compared to VB.NET because IL (.NET Intermediate Language) IS case-sensitive too.
>
>Marc,
>
>This person is attempting to mislead you. There is no correlation between the IL being case-sensitive and the language being case-sensitive. Unless you are writing your own compiler, there will never be a reason to write IL code by hand.

No, actually, the case-sensitive issue is not so unimportant. Granted VB.NET do the automatic conversion between the casing you're using and the proper casing to call whatever class method. But, if someone write different methods with the same name but different casing (OK this is a rather bad practice) how the VB will react ?

(As a digression, I don't like that much case-sensitiveness, it can lead to a lot of unecessary errors due to mistyping).

>
>>
>>IMHO, VB.NET should only choosen by those who have only programmed in VB. All the others should choose C# as it is more integrated with .NET (it seems that a lot of .NET classes are programmed in C#).
>
>This is misleading also. There is no relationship between the language that the framework classes were written in and the language you use to write code. You will never see or work with the source code of the .NET framework and the interface of the framework classes is identical, no matter which language you are using.
>

Of course, .NET works well with any language written for it but the advantage I perceive with the fact that much of .NET is written in C# is that C# will always be the no.1 language of .NET. That is, bleeding edge features always coming from new C# features (generics, C omega, etc.)

>With the information that Microsoft has released about the next version of .NET, it is clear that VB.NET is being steered towards maximum productivity and C# is leaning towards raw power. The beauty of .NET is that you don't have to permanently choose one language over the other. Work with both of them, see which one that you like the best. Then use that language for most of your projects.

Yes, the language used is not that important. But... for some reasons good or bad, VB programmers never had the same respect than their C/C++/Java pairs. Thus C# could be a more lucrative choice even for former VB6 developers.

Add to all that discussion that C# is an ECMA standard. That mean that you can use C# on other platforms (Linux and the Mono project for example, there is also a VB compiler for Mono but it does seem not yet complete nor identical to VB.net).

For all these reasons, I think C# has an edge over VB. But of course, there's nothing wrong with choosing VB over C# as the way to build programs in these two languages is very similar and should you need to switch to C# it would be very easy.