VS2005

[Pwnbroker]

So I just recently purchased VS2005, and I'm reading about the changes in VB2005 from 6.0. It seems that they took everything that makes VC++ 6.0 so good and implemented it into VB. Is VS going to eventually be just one language?

 

[Mark R]

When MS developed .NET they developed a series of languages to go with it.

.NET is very much like Java, in that it takes many of the good features of C++, builds on them and simplifies the language. On top of the .NET framework, MS developed a variety of languages - including VB.NET, C#, a 'managed' dialect of C++ - and there are several new third party languages which also build on .NET e.g. F#, Delphi.NET, FTN95 (a variant of FORTRAN)

Because all .NET languages are compiled into intermediate code - not true independent binaries - the concepts that the languages offer cannot differ too much from the underlying framework. Hence the great similarities between all the .NET languages.

That said, there has been a lot of 'cross-pollination' between different languages recently. I'm currently experimenting with C# v3 - which has pulled a whole host of new features from 'functional' languages like Python. Although these new features don't change the relation to the underlying framework - they provide simple, compact ways of performing tasks which would otherwise require significant coding effort. This is how languages develop - the good features survive and get incorporated into other new languages.