New vb.net enhancements?

Question

I've been hearing/reading a lot about the new language enhancements for C# 4. I'm a little curious if these same enhancements are also going to be applied to VB as well, or what. Does anyone know where I can get some insight here? With all the new changes happening to C#, it seems like there will very little reason left to be using VB unless you happen to like the syntax. Are there enhancements that MS isn't making to VB this time that are getting included in C#, or visa versa?

Answer 1

I'd actually overlook the dismissal of VB.Net by Lou Franco. Checkout Panopticon Central:

• http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2008/10/31/24803.aspx
• http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2008/10/29/24764.aspx

For example:

Then Lucian did a really wonderful demo of VB 10.0, which is shipping in Visual Studio 2010. He showed (IIRC) the following features that should be familiar to the readers of this blog: array literals, collection initializers, automatic properties, implicit line continuations, statement lambdas, generic variance, and a feature that embeds primary interop assembly types in your assembly so you don't have to deploy the PIA. I may have missed some, so check out the video when it's posted!

Answer 2

Some of the changes to C# (eg Named Optional Parameters) were already in VB. The main strength of VB.NET over C# was Office/COM integration, and the new C# is addressing that.

If you need to target an older .NET version, VB.NET will still be the one to use if you need these features.

Answer 3

Something still missing from C# that vb.net has had a little while: xml literals. But this isn't exactly new.