Making the jump from VB.NET to C#

I’ve been doing VB.NET for almost three years now and have been happy enough not to move onto another language – especially that other .NET language. But then, I was required to know it. Bummer! The task of learning a new language that was going to do exactly the same thing on exactly the same platform did not sound enticing at all. But, being a trooper, I sat down on a Saturday morning with my cup of coffee and started building a load testing tool in C#. I had to keep looking at help files and I had constant problems with case, brackets, parentheses and semicolons, but somehow, I made it through that day without major incident. In fact, I could even say that after 2 hours of programming C#, I seemed to be getting the gist of the idea. Within two weeks, I had found a project at work where C# would be acceptable. The project took me no longer to complete than it would had I written it in VB.NET.


I began that odyssey at the end of March. It is now the end of May and I already have had difficulty keeping semicolons out of my VB code. My point? If you know VB.NET well, the jump to C# is a minor adjustment with a lot of benefits; the biggest one being is that most jobs seem to want C#. Also, have you ever asked the great wise man, Google, for an example of a particular piece of code only to reject the answer because it was in C#? Not anymore. It doesn’t matter. You’re a C# and VB.NET developer! All it takes is a couple of cups of coffee, a Saturday morning and a bit of patience to get you started.