Visual Basic 2008 is phenomenally powerful

The C# advocates have done a great job at making .NET development synonymous with that language. Indeed, most online code examples you’ll find for .NET these days are C# based, as are most of the features you’ll see on sites like Channel9. Visual Basic is not dead yet though, and in fact Visual Basic 2008 is probably the most powerful version of Microsoft’s first RAD language ever.

I started looking through the VB docs last night after seeing an interview on Channel9 with Amanda Silva at TechEd. Did you know that XML can now be used as a first class literal in Visual Basic? Check this out

Dim author = _
    <Author>
        <Name>Pete Wright</Name>
    </Author>

If you’re particularly eagle eyed you may also have noticed in that snippet that I didn’t declare a type for ‘author’. That’s another feature new in 2008 – Type Inference. Since the XML isn’t formatted as a full document, the type of ‘author’ is XElement. Adding a doctype to the fragment makes the type an XDocument at runtime.

Dim author = _
    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <Author>
        <Name>Pete Wright</Name>
    </Author>

You can’t do that in C# at all (although you could get close with a nasty multi-line string and then various casting and object instantiationtricks). VB2008 even lets you embed queries right inside the XML literal, making it almost border on a built in XML templating system right there in the language. Visual Studio 2008 even throws in a little Intellisense magic when working with XML literals to make the whole thing just feel oh so right as well.

VB2008 takes a leaf out of the Python book with the use of object initializers. Imagine a situation where you want to create an object and immediately set a bunch of properties on that object. With an object initializer this can be achieved in a single command

Dim author = New Author With { .Name = "Pete Wright", .Genre = "Non Fiction"}

This creates an instance of a class called Author and then right away assigns values to the Name and Genre properties on the object. You can take this even further with the use of anonymous types. Check this out.

Dim author = New { .Name = "Pete Wright", .Genre = "Non Fiction"}

This makes VB create a brand new type on the fly with two properties (Name and Genre) and then sets those properties on the resulting instance. To me that’s wonderfully reminiscent of similar features in Python and Ruby and adds a stunning amount of power and flexibility to the old workhorse. Again, in both examples above you can see Type Inference at work. Why on earth would you want to specify the type when the immediate assignment makes it crystal clear just what we’re working with.

Type Inference, initializers, anonymous types and XML literal support are just a few of the new features I stumbled across last night, but there’s a lot more. VB has support for Lambdas now, as well as extension methods that let you extend objects at runtime in a Ruby Mixin kind of way. Linq adds powerful querying support irrespective of the data source you’re working with.

I’m going to start dusting off old code samples I wrote and updating them to learn more about the new features. I’ll probably blog the results as well. I’ve always had a soft spot for Visual Basic, if you couldn’t tell from the number of books I’ve written on it, and VB2008 has really ignited the old passion in me once again. While there are plenty of people out there that will happily knock you for using VB, the simple fact of the matter is that it is a phenomenally powerful programming language. It’s verbosity also makes it an ideal counter to the terseness of C# for many. That verbosity, used correctly, so often equates to cleaner, more instantly readable code.

Long Live VB I say, and kudos to Microsoft for giving the language a nice modern shot in the arm.