What is the Future of VB.Net in Software Development Companies?

Dying?? Not really. In fact, it is quite perplexing to understand whether VB.Net is useful for future developments, but you cannot say it is dead in the market. Being one of the oldest languages, so many projects are still working on VB.Net in the companies. Though there may be a lot of new technologies emerging in the market, thinking to convert these projects into updated trends is not an easy task. It requires a lot of effort, time, and money for that. Therefore, it is quite clear to say - VB.Net is not going to vanish in the market in the upcoming future.

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Any less demanding language in the market will stay at least for a substantial time frame. For instance, just consider VB6 which was declared as an Unsupportive language since a long ago but today still many firms working on the vast enterprise applications done through VB6. They are in a phase of migrating VB6 to VB.Net for future implementation.

More importantly, VB.Net uses the same libraries as that of C# in the .Net framework for web development. Therefore, many developers find it easy in using VB.Net, in fact, both have quite similar execution processes also. VB.Net code is easier to understand when compared to C#.

Another essential factor about VB.Net is that though people don’t find comfort in using this language anymore, it is still one of the favorite ones used for making GUIs in the Applications.

It is a fact that coding languages never die. Even the oldest coding languages such as Classic Asp, VB6, COBOL, FORTRAN, VB.Net, etc. are still in use in few organizations. As these have long coding standards that are already in huge numbers in the old projects, these languages have to be maintained in the market at least for understanding the code flow while conversion of Project.

VB.Net is not less when compared to PHP, Swift, etc., the reason for its downfall is people don’t like it to work with. And that’s why people started to focus on C# sidelining this language.

Though the world went to the other way, however, I must say there is nothing in C# which you can’t do in VB.Net.

Old, yet demanding language in the organizations

Still, many desktop applications are developed using VB.Net language because one can develop the application in a short time using VB.Net. Moreover, VB.Net is considered as the best language to learn for beginners to understand the process of coding in a simple way. Beginners can also get an easy understanding of functions, handlers, delegates, event raising, etc. with a simple basic-style syntax.

VB.Net also got support for LINQ in its VB.NET 9.0 version which reduces the burden on the SQL server.

Moreover, it is a bitter fact for VB.Net lovers that Microsoft focuses much on C# features.

There are still many top esteemed .Net Web Development firms are there which provide its astonishing VB.Net services to the clientele. Experts try all the possible ways to achieve the business goals of a client in a sustainable way but eliminating the VB code at a time is impossible. In many developed nations like the UK, the USA, Italy, etc. a lot of old large-scale projects are made of VB.Net and they have to continue with it until all the modules of the project get transformed into the latest standard language versions. In fact, VB.Net is known to be among the powerful languages of .Net framework, so it will definitely survive.

What are the reasons for VB.Net being widely used?

VB.Net has strong coding features that make endearing. The following are some reasons why VB.Net is being one of the widely used.

1. It supports OOPs concepts and features.
2. Being general-purpose as well as a modern language.
3. Easily understandable and component-oriented language.
4. Compilation can be possible on various platforms.
5. The best part is, this structured language is a crucial part of .Net Framework.
6. Efficient programming strategy and many more.

What is the importance of VB.Net?

Despite having a tentative future, there are significant reasons why most techies still consider the VB.Net an essential unit for their project developments. It even surprised the Tiobe analysts when they got to know that Visual Basic .Net programming language was the fifth most popular language as per the index of December 2018. While the other top four listed languages are C++, Python, C, and Java. At the same time, it had also amazed so many after perceiving the fact that it had even put JavaScript behind in the competition. People prefer VB.Net mostly for office applications in small as well as medium-scale organizations. Because of its easy to learn nature, it is still being adopted by several developers.

Let us understand the advantages of VB.Net:

1. VB.Net completely includes object-oriented mechanisms. This is considered as a major addition for VB.Net because the previous versions such as VB6 and other releases were lacking it.
2. As VB.Net has indirect pointers handling support, it overcomes the instability issue in the application to a large extent.
3. Late binding is supported with the Strict Off option.
4. VB.Net includes all the features that are supported in other languages of the dot net framework. VB.Net runs under CLR i.e., Common Language Runtime providing managed code execution. That means it delivers classy, robust, and secure applications with the help of all these features.
5. Having so many optional features support, VB.Net makes COM interoperability much easier.
6. The best feature of VB.Net is that it passes the data in the form of simple text strings. And this is done by utilizing XML between the various layers.
7. Once an object becomes useless in the development, the CLR of the framework releases the resources. Basically this is known as Garbage collection. It actually relieves us from the burden of memory management in the application.

Previously, VB6 was recognized as an interpreter-based language, and just after the official release of VB.Net, it was referred as a compiled language. To talk about the data handling mechanism, VB6 follows DAP, RAO, and ADO protocols whereas the VB.Net utilizes the ADO.Net mechanism. The popularity for VB.Net has been caught after the addition and alteration of the runtime environment. The impeccable design of CLR runtime, better code translation feature through JIT compiler (Just In Time compiler), Garbage collector support empowered it beyond the margins.

Features of VB.Net

1. Automated garbage collector:
   1. Once the object turns into unreferenced in the source code, it will eliminate it and reclaims its memory space automatically.
2. Windows Forms:
   1. While VB.Net application development, you can efficiently inherit your form from the parent (already existing) form and design it much attractively.
3. Multithreading support:
   1. As VB.Net has the support for simple multithreading, it will allow the applications to deal with multiple tasks consecutively.
4. References:
   1. If you want to utilize the external object in the source code of the VB.Net application, then you must reference it.
5. Event logs:
   1. With the support of modern features such as Event logs, Performance counters, File systems, etc., you can easily create mind-blowing web applications.

Exception Classes in VB.Net

Basically, an exception is nothing but an obstacle or a bug raised while the VB.Net program execution. These are the means to transfer control from one unit to another unit of a program. In VB.Net, the exception handling mechanism is built using four keywords –

1. Try
2. Catch
3. Throw
4. Finally

Let’s have a look at the exception classes supported in VB.Net:

System.IO.IOException: It manages the I/O related errors.

System.IndexOutOfRangeException: It would handle the errors that arose when any method is referred to an array index that is beyond the range.

System.ArrayTypeMismatchException: The error that gets generated when an array type mismatch occurs would be handled by this class.

System.NullReferenceException: Errors related to referencing of the null object would be handled by this class.

System.DivideByZeroException: When you divide the dividend with 0, then the error occurs are handled by this class.

System.InvalidCastException: The typecasting related errors would be controlled by this class.

Some other classes that are supported in VB.Net are System.StackOverflowException, System.OutOfMemoryException, etc.

To sum up, with the thought of VB.Net is dead or not, it is all about popularity and consistency in the market. Programming languages never die, they are just sidelined according to the advancements and supportive features.