New From Microsoft!

Since 1991, Visual Basic has held the hand of new and experienced programmers as they meandered their way through the minefield of Windows application development. That’s why we here at Microsoft are pleased to announce some of the exciting changes included in the upcoming release of Visual Basic 2010. These new features will simplify each and every programming task you encounter, and will help bring about an age of language parity never before offered from any company that owned a collection of popular programming languages.

Here are just a few of the great changes included in Visual Basic 2010.

• No More Line Continuation Characters. Hit the Enter key whenever you want; we don’t care! To assist you in identifying the end of each line, use the new “Full Line Termination” character–the semicolon.

• Variable Declaration Simplification. As a Visual Basic programmer, you’re always looking to simplify your programming experience. So now, instead of the verbose, wasteful variable declaration syntax found in past editions, you’ll be able to use the new time-saving syntax. (Don’t forget that new Full Line Termination character.)

Old: Dim customerName As String

New: String customerName;

• Simplified Control Structure Syntax. Block statements such as If/End If and For/Next are great, but they don’t allow you to easily find the end of the block from the beginning, something that is especially vexing in large block statements. The new Block Match feature of Visual Studio lets you jump quickly between the start and end of a block. To support this feature, Visual Basic requires the new “Curly Brace” syntax for loops, conditions, and Select Case statements.

• Lower Case Alternatives. If your pinkie fingers are all tuckered out from typing the mixed-case keyword names that define Visual Basic, you’ll love our new lowercase alternatives. For instance, instead of “Imports,” try “using.”

These are just a few of the productivity enhancements you find in every box of Visual Basic–if we were still shipping physical boxes, that is. And remember, kids, the new version of Visual Basic makes a great gift for the C# programmers in your life.

(Text copyright (c) 2009 by Tim Patrick. Image Credits: Microsoft)