The chronic suffering of the VB.NET community
As someone who was a VB developer back when VB.NET first shipped twenty years ago, I&#x27;m kind of surprised by this. VB.NET was very clearly a second-class citizen in the .NET ecosystem even back then. While Microsoft paid lip service to supporting it equally with C#, it was very clear from the huge volume of documentation, tutorials, books, etc. they put out for C# compared to the tiny volume for VB.NET that C# was where they really wanted developers to be. And syntactically VB.NET felt more like C#-with-training-wheels than &quot;classic&quot; VB anyway, which reinforced the impression.<p>Given how big C# ended up becoming, I&#x27;m wondering why anyone committed to staying in the .NET ecosystem would have stuck with VB.NET all this time. What&#x27;s the attraction? I could see it as a transitional stage to get classic VB developers started on the road to C#, but as a long-term solution it seemed doomed to chronic suffering from birth.