The Importance of Visual Basic

Early in the adoption cycle of .NET, Microsoft’s new language, C#, got the lion’s share of attention. However, as .NET adoption has increased, Visual Basic’s continuing importance has also been apparent. Microsoft has publicly stated that it considers Visual Basic to be the language of choice for applications where developer productivity is one of the highest priorities.

Future development of Visual Basic is emphasizing capabilities that enable access to the whole expanse of the .NET Framework in the most productive way, while C# development is emphasizing the experience of writing code. That fits the traditional role of Visual Basic as the language developers use in the real world to create business applications as quickly as possible.

This difference is more than academic. One of the most important advantages of the .NET Framework is that it enables applications to be written with dramatically less code. In the world of business applications, the goal is to concentrate on writing business logic and to eliminate routine coding tasks as much as possible. In other words, of greatest value in this new world is writing robust, useful applications with as little code as possible, not churning out a lot of code.

Visual Basic is an excellent fit for this type of development, which makes up the bulk of software development in today’s economy. Moreover, it will grow to be an even better fit as it is refined and evolves for exactly that purpose.