Visual Basic.Net ain't half bad
There I said it.
I'm a C# guy. Now about 4 years when I started with .Net I started writing in VB.Net but I quickly decided to move C#. This, despite having spent the 3+ years prior working in ASP Classic. After a little bit of C# I quickly adopted the typical C# snobbish opinion of VB. For no good reason mind you, just cause it was different.
My how things change.
I've joined a VB team and instead of trying to make the team change to C# I figured I'd just get back to VB. Also we do a lot of work with XML so it got me looking into the VB 9.0 XML features and I found that you can do things like this:
1: Imports <xmlns:ns="http://contacts">
2:
3: Dim contact1 As XElement = _
4: <contact>
5: <name>Joe Bloggs</name>
6: <phone type="home">09-555-0144</phone>
7: <phone type="mobile">021-555-0145</phone>
8: </contact>
Okay, nifty and all, but what do you do from there...How about this?
1: Dim phoneTypes As XElement = _
2: <phoneTypes>
3: <%= From phone In contacts...<phone> _
4: Select <type><%= phone.@type %></type> _
5: %>
6: </phoneTypes>
And that will give you the following XML
<phoneTypes> <type>home</type> <type>mobile</type> </phoneTypes>
That's rather cool and really useful with some of the stuff I'll be working on.
Check out the Overview of LINQ to XML in Visual Basic for more details
Now, I still want to say I'm a C# guy, but I think the snickering at the mention of VB stops now.