C# vs. VB.NET again

In one of the questions posted on the C# Frequently Asked Questions blog, they talk about the advantages of C# over VB.NET. As always, this is something a lot of discussions have been going around, but it’s nice to hear a sum up from the C# team itself. But with some of the points I seriously question their opinion on some of the legacy stuff. Some of the VB.NET advantages: * Support for optional parameters – very handy for some COM interoperability
Seriously, couldn’t this be promoted differently? I know some VB.NET developers still using this feature, because it’s so handy, and not just for COM interoperability. Isn’t it just legacy, still available in a very new development platform?

  • Various legacy VB functions (provided in the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace)
    Again, this legacy, why did they add this to .NET? They only reason I can think of, why this is still here, is because their VB2VB.NET converter couldn’t handle those functions. Or am I missing something here?
  • The with construct: it’s a matter of debate as to wether this is an advantage or not, but it’s certainly a difference.
    Now this I could live with, the with construct. On the Ask a C# Language Designer page they try to answer this and the only reasons are because there are only small or non-existent readability benefits (which I don’t agree with), increased language complexity (which is not my problem) and because of the C++ heritage (which I also don’t get, because C# was promoted to have the benefits of multiple languages). They even admit the with construct delivers more performance. Then ofcourse the C# advantages: * XML documentation
    NDoc rules, doesn’t it?! 🙂

And then some other things like operator overloading, using statement and unsafe code, which just aren’t in VB.NET.
Anyway, my point is, that the legacy advantages of VB.NET aren’t advantages. I still don’t care what choice people make or what language I have to develop my projects in (although I prefer C#) I just don’t get it when people come up with these legacy advantages.