I did not enjoy this event. I had to leave early because the attendees were not allowed to ask the speakers any questions.

And to top that, the first guy that presented had a slide that said something like “VB.NET is the only real .NET programming language”. I've been under the gun a few times during my career and had to program in VB and VB.NET. I've coded in VB 3.0 for 16-bit Windows and VB.NET that came with Visual Studio 2003 and 2005. I've never enjoyed programming in this language.

With VB 3.0, it was all about lack of access to critcal Windows APIs - like no functionality for callbacks from the Windows API, or no access to the UI message loop, etc.

With VB.NET, how can anyone call it a real .NET programming language? For instance, the VB.NET compiler lets you assign a string type variable to a double type variable, and the CLR throws an exception at run-time. That's not a real .NET language, since it's not compliant with CTS.

Other than that, even Visual Studio is not that smart when it comes to VB.NET. I've had to maintain VB.NET code written by other programmers and at one time, I had to fix some code that had a lot of nested if ... then and end if constructs. Every time I added or removed an end if from the nested code, Visual Studio would apply some very unnecessary and confusing realignment to the code indentation. It was crazy.

I'm sure there are other problems with VB/VB.NET.

I like to code in C# and at this time I'm trying to gather as much information as I can about F#, a new programming language out of Microsoft.

Thanks.