#Visual basic for applications training code#
#Visual basic for applications training windows#

The primary reason for the large number of errors I got on the first conversion was because of Option Strict being turned off in their projects. Also, has a good reference regarding why turning on Option Strict is a good idea. For more information on this option in Visual Studio, read the Microsoft docs at. It's recommended by Microsoft, and widely considered to be a best practice, to turn Option Strict on to increase performance and reduce the possibility of naming and runtime errors.

This is done for backward-compatibility reasons. When you create a new VB project in Visual Studio, the default value for Option Strict is off. Go to your project properties, click on the Compile tab, and you can turn this option on there. One of the best things you can do right now is to turn Option Strict on in all your VB projects. As we all know, compile-time errors are preferable to runtime errors. This can cause performance issues, and introduce runtime errors, instead of catching errors during compile-time. Although many statements, such as CInt(), can be converted into MSIL, some statements in VB might take many more MSIL statements compared to a pure. NET, and modern compile languages, do things. NET way of doing things.” It's not that these things are necessarily bad, it's just different from the way. It has different ways of doing things compared to what is considered the “correct. The BASIC language was developed in the 1960s, about 40 years before. Although these methods ultimately do the same thing, the CInt() method doesn't translate to the same MSIL because it does a lot of type checking at runtime to handle some of the quirks that VB lets you get away with. For example, in Visual Basic you might write CInt(stringValue) to convert a string to an integer instead of using the Convert.ToInt32() method. VB has its own versions of some of these methods to be consistent with older versions of VB. For example, the Convert class has methods such as ToInt32(), ToBoolean(), etc. There's a set of Framework classes that all languages have access to. Each language compiler takes the syntax of the language and converts the statements into the appropriate intermediate language (MSIL) that's eventually compiled into executable code. The services of the CLR give each language a common data-type system, automatic memory management, garbage collection, and many other features. NET, such as Visual Basic, C#, F#, COBOL, etc. This CLR provides a set of services for all languages that wish to use. NET on a Common Language Runtime (CLR) library. The rest of this article describes the things you should start doing immediately in your VB programs. From this list, I came up with the list of best practices you should employ in your VB programming to make the transition simpler.

#Visual basic for applications training code#

After the first run of the conversion tool, I encountered about 15,000 errors upon the first compile of the translated C# code.Īs I worked my way through the errors, I compared the C# code to what was in the original VB code. The tool, Instant C# ( ), did a decent job on most of the VB code, but it can't convert everything if you don't write VB the correct (.NET) way.

#Visual basic for applications training windows#

Working with my current client, I took their complete VB Windows Forms application and ran it through a tool that purports to convert VB to C#. Remembering my transition, I've come up with a list of things you can do in your VB programming to ease your transition to C# today. C# doesn't allow you get away with as many bad programming practices. Making the switch was a little painful at first because I realized how much sloppy coding Visual Basic lets you get away with. I then programmed in both for a couple of years, but then switched completely to C#. I started programming Visual Basic right when VB 3.0 came out. In this article, I'll take you through the process my team and I have come up with to make the conversion much easier. They have a very large Windows Forms application that they've committed to converting to C#. How do you prepare for converting your VB applications to C#? I'm currently helping one company do that. Right or wrong as that might be, you can't fight the trend. Programmers don't want to keep working in what are viewed as legacy technologies. If you currently have VB applications, and your current programmer(s) quit, you're going to be hard-pressed to replace them. NET applications, but it's just not the cool kid down the block anymore. Visual Basic is a perfectly good language for creating. As we all see when searching the Web, there are more samples in C# than there are in VB. It seems that more programmers are switching to C# from Visual Basic (VB) than ever before.