Microsoft is deprecating VBScript in favor of "more advanced" alternatives like JavaScript and PowerShell in a three-phase plan that looks like it will wrap up shortly after 2027 or so.
"For the first time, developers can use VB.NET and XAML to build web applications," exclaimed Giovanni Albani, CEO of Userware, in announcing the general availability of OpenSilver 2.0.
Microsoft updated its programming languages strategy, confirming that Visual Basic will remain a going concern even though it's still relegated to second-rate status when compared to C# and F#.
"This means VB.NET developers can keep using VB, and go to .NET, and get to .NET Core all at once."
Learn all about global using directives, Fantomas, where Hot Reload works and doesn't work and much more in this one-stop-shop roundup of new programming language features and functionality.
Two members of Microsoft's Windows Forms dev team appeared in a Channel 9 video on "Supporting VB.NET" in .NET 5," a task that in some ways poses "a huge challenge."
RemObjects has debuted the Mercury programming language, described as a modern Visual Basic "with a future" for all platforms.
With the milestone .NET 5 and Visual Studio 2019 v16.8 releases now out, Microsoft is reminding Visual Basic coders that their favorite programming language enjoys full support and the troublesome Windows Forms Designer is even complete -- almost.
Visual Basic continues to rank highly in various popularity and salary indices despite being deprecated by Microsoft, with the most recent examples coming from freelance development platform Upwork and popularity index TIOBE.
Mobilize.Net, an "automated modernization" specialist headed by a former Microsoft corporate VP, has upgraded its Visual Basic upgrade tool to target .NET Core, the open source, cross-platform successor of the Windows-only .NET Framework.
Notwithstanding Microsoft's death knell for Visual Basic, a new project scheduled to debut this fall aims to keep at least some semblance of the iconic programming language going and evolving.
While the latest TIOBE Index of programming language popularity isn't earth-shaking -- focusing on an all-time high for statistical language R -- perhaps the the biggest surprise is this: Classic Visual Basic (VB6) is still in the top 20.
Microsoft has open sourced GW-BASIC, a programming language developed some 38 years ago. GW-BASIC and variants such as QBasic, QuickBasic and others provided the onramp to computer programming for many industry veterans.
"I think we can say that VB.NET finally made it to ASP.NET Core," Egyptian developer Mohammed Hamdy Ghanem told <i>Visual Studio Magazine</i> about his new open-source project.
In its move to the open-source, cross-platform .NET Core, Microsoft will support Visual Basic in the upcoming .NET 5 and is expanding the programming language's supported application types to help VB developers migrate their code, but noted "we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language."
It may not signal a VB resurgence, but the Rubberduck project continues to flesh out the Visual Basic for Applications editor into a full-fledged IDE.
Microsoft's C# programming language has passed Visual Basic .NET on the TIOBE Index -- which measures language popularity -- and is even in the running for being named "Programming Language of the Year" for 2019.
An automatic update among last week's Patch Tuesday security fixes ended up wreaking havoc with existing applications sporting Visual Basic code, borking them for days until an optional update to fix the problem was published.
Microsoft is continuing its long deprecation of VBScript in its Internet Explorer 11 Web browser for security reasons.
Visual Basic.NET is getting comfortable in its new position as a top five programming language in the TIOBE index, which measures popularity based on search engine data.