Mindcracker, Inc. is a custom software solution provider. Recently, I had a discussion with one of our clients about migrating their existing Windows Forms applications written in the previous version of VB.NET to C#. This is not abnormal. Today, I saw a discussion about the future of VB.NET.
In this article, I will try to answer the same question.
All children are equal
Microsoft continues to say they treat all three languages, C#, F#, and VB.NET as primary languages in .NET. Watch this Channel 9 video in which program managers and leads of these languages talk about the future of .NET languages.
As you can see from the above video, the future of all three languages is moving forward and so far, Microsoft has no plans to stop it.
VB.NET Ranking
Let’s take a look at the Most Popular Programming Languages of the past two years, and you will see VB.NET still holds the #10 spot.
What Does Google Trends Say?
Let’s look at Google Trends for the past five years. Clearly, the search terms for VB.NET are going down significantly.
And then there is the truth
Popularity and demand of a product, including a programming language, is usually driven by its market demand. I work with and meet many clients, innovators, and community leaders and I can clearly say that the talk about and need of VB.NET is slowing down, compared to C# and F#. Most of the new work I see is being developed in C#.
Based on my personal observation, C# has a better future.
I did some more digging and visited several online job portals to see what the job market for these languages looks like. The Job portals include Indeed, Glassdoor, Monster, and Dice. The following table shows the number of job openings in different cities from different sources.
Source | Location | C# | VB.NET | Java |
Indeed.com | New York, NY | 1,084 | 135 | 2,859 |
Glassdoor | San Francisco, CA | 1,256 | 307 | 5.518 |
Monster | Los Angeles, CA | 566 | 84 | 1,000+ |
Dice | Chicago, IL | 314 | 38 | 554 |
Glassdoor | Philadelphia, PA | 823 | 154 | 1,348 |
You can clearly see from the above table that there are more C# jobs compared to VB.NET.
So where do you go from here?
If you’re a pure VB.NET developer and have not done any other programming, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re a .NET developer, it should not matter what language is being used. All you need is to learn the language syntax. You can quickly learn C# language syntaxes and you’re as good as VB.NET.
Here is an intro book to get started with C#:
Good luck!
Recommended readings: