.net - Converting C# knowledge to VB.NET any potential problems?

Question

I have a team with people that are quite comfortable in C# but we got a requirement to write a project in VB.net. How hard would it be to think in C# and on the fly convert to VB? Is that doable?

Could you list the issues that we can come across?

I heard that VB.net doesn't have closures. Is that still true for .net 3.5?

Answer 1

If you are approaching VB.Net with the mindset of C# it's best to set the following options in the project

• Option Strict On
• Option Explicit On
• Option Infer On

This essentially removes the late binding semantics of VB.Net and forces it to be a strictly typed language. This will make it closer to C# semantic wise (still not exact by any means).

VB.Net has Lambda Expression (and hence Closure) support starting with the Visual Studio 2008 / .Net Framework 3.5 release. Not expression and not Statement. Statement lambdas are not supported until VS2010 / .Net Framework 4.0. Although you can use the 4.0 compiler to downtarget 2.0 frameworks.