

How is it possible for Visual Basic to be most popular .NET language? Lessons from past? Or?  - edw519
http://msmvps.com/blogs/bill/archive/2007/11/02/counting-deck-chairs-on-the-titanic.aspx

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DougBTX
The key line is "VB is the best language of the two for working with COM
legacy applications," remembering that "legacy applications" includes
Microsoft Office.

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rufo
Absolutely. I've (unfortunately) done some work on a vertical market app for
homebuilders that is mostly written in Excel. If you're using the Office COM
API, there is some syntactical sugar that VB.NET handles for you that makes it
far easier to write VB.NET over C#, as much as I'd prefer to use it.

Theoretically I could abstract it out and have VB.NET wrappers, but
considering the rest of the app is written inside of Excel using VBA, it just
seemed to make more sense to leave it in VB.NET (read: lazy programmer).

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icey
From consulting experience, I can tell you that VB.Net is still HUGE amongst
smaller companies. They often started with some custom application years ago
that had an upgrade path of Excel > Access > VB 5 or 6, and ultimately landed
on VB.Net.

It's easy to forget that there are a ton of applications out there that have
been homegrown by the "office computer guy"; which is to say a developer that
has never had any real training and fell into a developer position by
necessity more than anything else.

My assumption is that for the shade tree developer, a book with "Visual Basic
dot anything" on the cover is going to be more "friendly" seeming than any
other language, especially one that uses glyphs right in the name (C#).

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tptacek
Most software development happens inside big companies on applications that
will never leave their walls. That software is written in Java and Visual
Basic.

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bigtoga
90 out of 100 .NET programmers that I know and work with use C# and know VB
but choose not to use it so it's funny to see these stats to me.

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giardini
You both _know_ and work with 100 (or more) .NET programmers?

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bigtoga
I'm a software trainer and .NET/SQL consultant so, Yes :)

