While I am not an expert on the subject, in my tenure as a founder of the Bay Area .NET Users Group (Bay.NET), I am very much aware of cultural differences between programmers who work with the Visual Basic and C# languages. An excellent overview written by Nigel Shaw on these cultural differences can be found here.

Having lived in many places throughout the world I would consider myself as one who is most interested in culture and cultural differences. In my experiences, I have discovered in myself an inclination to find things I appreciate about other cultures (and people).

I think we all tend to look at differences, be they cultural, as in those who prefer Apple Computers to Windows or Linux and make some value judgments based on what camp we live in and what camp they live in.

My late friend Rich Gold put it beautifully in his biographical work The Plenitude when he said:

“During my life I put on and took off four hats of creativity: artist, scientist, designer and engineer. I think of each one as quite distinct with its own methods, world views, precedents, predecessors, style of dress, interior decorations, histories, vocabularies, alliances, likes, dislikes, prejudices, tools, techniques and demeanors. I can walk into an office and know immediately if it is a designer’s office or an engineer’s office. I instantaneously know if it is an artist’s loft or a scientist’s lab even if they are filled with the same digital tools. Actually it is only with great effort that I have begun thinking about them as hats; in some real way, for me, they are states of being as different as alligators and elephants.”

The one thing Rich made extremely clear about these cultures is that all of them are essential to create a great product.

What is true regarding Gold’s observations of the artist / scientist / designer / engineer cultures is also true of the Visual Basic and C# cultures (as well as those of all other programming languages): We need all of them to make truly great products.

Prior to and since its incorporation into the .NET framework, Visual Basic has been perceived by many as somewhat of an ugly stepchild by many programmers whose language of choice is not Visual Basic.

And that is why the new version of Visual Basic.NET – VB9, to be released as part of Visual Studio 2008 is so terribly exciting to me. It marks a powerful sea change in the Visual Basic language where the culture behind that language is bringing some exciting innovation to the .NET platform based through language-specific features.

I will be spending the next few blog posts, writing about, among other things, these new language features. They are features that are important for all .NET developers to know about so informed choices can be made regarding the approach used to build software applications.

XML Literals in VB9

The first VB9 feature I think it going to make me more productive as a programmer is the ability to work with XML literals directly in code. From a description, this may not seem like much, but it represents is a new paradigm of working with XML natively in a programming language. No longer do I need to learn an API to work with XML, but I can write XML in 2 lines of code, as follows:

That may not seem like much, but VB9 also supports embedded expressions that are evaluated at runtime within the XML literals, that, when combined with language integrated query (LINQ) to enable very powerful, yet simple constructions, such as:

The <%= ... > syntax above represents an embedded expression and you can nest these recursively as many levels as you need to represent the desired structure.

These are things you just cannot do in any other .NET language and will make a huge different in productivity for any job where the construction of XML is required.