I decided this week that I can put it off no longer, I need to start writing my sites in C# instead of VB.Net. For my own sake I need to come out of my comfort zone and learn to program in C# as more and more contract jobs I look at require it. It worked out quite well really as I am just starting a new site from scratch so I decided that for the new site I was not going to write a single line of code in VB.
To be honest so far it hasn’t been anything like as bad as I thought it would be, initially it took some getting used to but there are so many resources online to help that it hasn’t slowed me too much. I’ve done a few pages and built a few classes and it’s not really hugely different to VB. There are of course some major differences, it’s much more case sensitive, it’s less tolerant of sloppy code in terms of declaring types etc, and I keep forgetting those bloody semicolons at the end of each line.
The only other major thing that’s catching me out so far is that some things seem back to front compared to VB. I am thinking of things like declaring variables, where it almost seems like going from English to French where sentences get flipped, if that makes sense.
I still find myself thinking in VB, and I am quite often going to online converters to show me how to convert my code between the two, but I’m confident that in time this will change. Incidentally, if you’re looking for a good VB.Net to C# and visa versa converter I’ve gotten on very well with this one: http://www.developerfusion.co.uk/utilities/convertvbtocsharp.aspx
If you are a VB developer and you’re considering this move too, I recommend that you do it now. It’s not as difficult as you think and as someone who is actively looking for .Net contract work the VB ones are getting worryingly few and far between.
