It’s been quite a while since last time I touched Visual Basic along with it’s default IDE – Visual Studio. Yesterday I had a quick chance to see it again, since I needed to help on the project which is under development in this environment.
What I can say – things are still as ugly as they used to be (IMHO). So few notes about things that pissed me off:
Auto indent in visual studio is more harmful rather than helpful. Auto completion is very annoying (it tries to complete everything I type instantly and with things different from what I want). All the time I was fighting with these two. I guess there are options to disable/enable features like that or configure different behavior, but in default configuration it sucks. Syntax highlighting is very poor (only highlights few reserved words with one different color).
Now with regards to Visual Basic: it is very interesting to see a language with uses “_” (underscore) to indicate that the line will continue after newline (VB does not use semicolons to indicate the end of statement, instead all statements are one per line), and uses ” ‘ ” (single parenthesis) to start comments. I know languages which are dependent on new lines, but more classical sign to show a continuation of line would be “\” (backslash), while for comment, either “#” (hash) or // (double slash) or /* */ (combination of slashes with starts for long comments) is used.
I had some other thoughts on function names and other, but I will leave this one out :)
Don’t trying to blame anything here, just my view of things as I touched them by accident after using Vim for coding PHP/Perl/C for a while.