Switching to C#

After more than 7 years of VB.Net development, I have made the conscious decision to split my development into primarily VB.Net for most of my ASP.Net projects and C# for my Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, and WPF work. This transition was due to three primary driving forces:

• Early Windows Phone 7 development (pre-RTM) was limited to C# due to the lack of availability for VB.Net support on the WP7 platform.
• There appears to be a larger codebase of Silverlight and WP7 utilities, samples, and tutorials in C# to learn from.
• I have had an easier time finding advanced Linq syntax examples in C#.

The syntax differences are not much different. I was already used to the most common syntactic differences, such as parenthesis, squiggly brackets, and semi-colons from my earlier work in PHP and Java. I would have started in C# if it were not for the Classic ASP and VB.Net applications I was supporting years ago in my .Net 1.1 beginnings.

Of course, the language selection is always trumped by complying with my clients’ corporate development standards and selecting the appropriate language for the job where the differences are relevant.

photo credit: avlxyz / CC BY-SA 2.0