Microsoft said this week that it will support Visual Basic on .NET 5.0 but will no longer add new features or evolve the language.
“Starting with .NET 5, Visual Basic will support Class Library, Console, Windows Forms, WPF, Worker Service, [and] ASP.NET Core Web API … to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want to migrate their applications to .NET Core,” the .NET team wrote in a post to the Microsoft DevBlogs. “Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language … The future of Visual Basic … will focus on stability, the application types listed above, and compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic.”
Worse, Microsoft in 2017 announced that its original C#/VB co-development strategy was over. Only C# would get all of the new features, while VB would focus on the simpler and more approachable scenarios that it once dominated. But that never really happened, and Microsoft effectively abandoned VB. This week’s announcement just makes it official.
“Starting with .NET 5, Visual Basic will support Class Library, Console, Windows Forms, WPF, Worker Service, [and] ASP.NET Core Web API … to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want to migrate their applications to .NET Core,” the .NET team wrote in a post to the Microsoft DevBlogs. “Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language … The future of Visual Basic … will focus on stability, the application types listed above, and compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic.”
Worse, Microsoft in 2017 announced that its original C#/VB co-development strategy was over. Only C# would get all of the new features, while VB would focus on the simpler and more approachable scenarios that it once dominated. But that never really happened, and Microsoft effectively abandoned VB. This week’s announcement just makes it official.