Thursday, March 23, 2006

Microsoft still supports Visual Basic?

I recently received some email critical of my claim that Microsoft no longer supports or provides Visual Basic. I suppose this is a fair point. They do after all still sell a product called Visual Basic.

So what gives? An awful lot of people don't think that the new Visual Basic .Net product is Visual Basic at all. It's more of a version of C# (a Java clone, more or less) with some BASIC syntax thrown on top. It's not hard to use Google to find many articles of people who agree with this sentiment.

Here are some examples that I found in just minute:

http://www.sqlmag.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=21050&

And from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_.NET#Comparative_samples
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_.NET#Controversy_concerning_VB.NET

If there's any dishonesty here, I claim that it's on Microsoft's part. For years people complained that Visual Basic isn't BASIC. Now people are complaining that VB.Net isn't Visual Basic. Where does it end? ;-)