Future Directions

Given the amount of language change that developers must digest in Visual Basic .NET, the principal plan for the language in the future is stability. Having made significant compatibility breaks with this version, we are now returning to a much more conservative stance regarding changing the behavior of existing code, restricting ourselves primarily to fixing obvious bugs . As much as possible, we wish to allow people time to make the conversion from Visual Basic 6.0 (and earlier versions) without imposing any additional concepts or new learning on them.

There were, however, some features that did not make it into Visual Basic .NET that we are strongly considering for the future. Many have to do with improving compatibility with Visual Basic 6.0, such as reintroducing arrays with nonzero lower bounds. Some have to do with .NET features that we don't fully support, such as operator overloading and unsigned types. And still others are just perennial feature requests , such as bit-shifting operators. Although it is impossible to say whether any of these features will or will not be in a future release, this discussion gives a general idea of the kinds of things that are under consideration.

For the long term , the two primary goals of the Visual Basic language have always been functionality and simplicity. As the .NET platform itself moves forward and adds features, it is important that the Visual Basic language evolve to continue to provide access to many, if not all, of those features. And, just as the language today abstracts concepts such as events to a simpler level, a focus of the language design is always on making the complexities of programming as straightforward as possible. With the introduction of concepts such as inheritance and overloading, there is no question that the Visual Basic .NET language has taken on a new degree of complexity. Finding ways to simplify that complexity for the common programmer in future versions is an area of particular importance.