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At work, I'm the maintainer of a 30k SLOC VB.NET codebase. Originally windows-only, when I took over I ran it under mono on Linux and OSX. The day that MS relea

At work, I'm the maintainer of a 30k SLOC VB.NET codebase. Originally windows-only, when I took over I ran it under mono on Linux and OSX. The day that MS released dotnetcore, I jumped to that. Overall the experience has been really good. There are lots of complexities, but in short... .NET 5 gave it a 4% speed boost across the board, going up to 20% [!] in some cases. Mainly that was ascribable to the intersection of GC improvements and kinda-degenerate cases in the model. For this particular codebase, very little in that article will be that significant [the VB.NET code uses a pretty limited set of stuff in the core libraries]. But their trajectory, and a million tiny improvements, really gives me a lot of optimism. What I originally considered a pretty cynical stab at Oracle when they released .NET's source has really turned into a wonderful, performant, developer-friendly, and pleasantly-cross-platform ecosystem.

plasma 5y ago
Wanted to mention in case it was interesting to you, but there’s a Roslyn powered plugin that can convert VB to C#, see https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SharpDevelopTeam.CodeConverter https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SharpDev...
phillipcarter 5y ago
I think it's really cool to see a successful example of modernizing a VB.NET codebase so that it too can play with the cool kids. I never really understood the disdain for VB.NET in the developer community, since the language has all kinds of neat little tricks up its sleeve. Kudos for pushing the counter-narrative.
- chunkyks 5y ago
  This tool started off as Excel VBA a million years ago, and has made trips through VB6 on its way to VB.NET. The language is ... ehhhhh. I don't love it, but I don't hate it either. There are things I like, but occasional items that are awful. Sometimes at the same time. shrug I've been doing this too long to get worked up about language. Of the tools I own nowadays, VB.NET is somewhere in the middle of the pack.
  - phillipcarter 5y ago
    > Sometimes at the same time. This is how you know you're really working with something :) A really great article by a friend of mine (and ex-VB.NET PM) is here. Really cool to go through it from time to time: https://anthonydgreen.net/2019/02/12/exhausting-list-of-differences-between-vb-net-c/ https://anthonydgreen.net/2019/02/12/exhausting-list-of-diff...

plasma 5y ago

Wanted to mention in case it was interesting to you, but there’s a Roslyn powered plugin that can convert VB to C#, see https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SharpDevelopTeam.CodeConverter https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SharpDev...

phillipcarter 5y ago

I think it's really cool to see a successful example of modernizing a VB.NET codebase so that it too can play with the cool kids. I never really understood the disdain for VB.NET in the developer community, since the language has all kinds of neat little tricks up its sleeve. Kudos for pushing the counter-narrative.

chunkyks 5y ago
This tool started off as Excel VBA a million years ago, and has made trips through VB6 on its way to VB.NET. The language is ... ehhhhh. I don't love it, but I don't hate it either. There are things I like, but occasional items that are awful. Sometimes at the same time. shrug I've been doing this too long to get worked up about language. Of the tools I own nowadays, VB.NET is somewhere in the middle of the pack.
- phillipcarter 5y ago
  > Sometimes at the same time. This is how you know you're really working with something :) A really great article by a friend of mine (and ex-VB.NET PM) is here. Really cool to go through it from time to time: https://anthonydgreen.net/2019/02/12/exhausting-list-of-differences-between-vb-net-c/ https://anthonydgreen.net/2019/02/12/exhausting-list-of-diff...