[Enhancement] Include Support for VB

[njsokalski]

Summary

Previous Xamarin project templates supported only C#, I would like to see support for VB as well

API Changes

The API would remain primarily the same aside from being a different language

Intended Use Case

The use cases would include the ability to use VB for code. Allowing developers to reuse pieces of existing code that are not full assemblies, as well as take advantage of Intellisense for the language they are most fluent in would significantly reduce development time as well as simplify debugging.

[VladislavAntonyuk]

VB.NET and C# have the same IL code as the output. You can call your VB.NET shared code from C# library

[njsokalski]

I understand that, I may have been unclear in my question. My question is whether Visual Studio (the related project templates) will allow you to use VB when writing the code for the current project, including event handlers and other code that is not shared.

[DualBrain]

I would also like to see this. Having to constantly do the mental shift is unnecessarily taxing... and shouldn't be. Sure, I could switch to C#... but I don't desire to do that either as I PREFER to code in VB.

My main question around this is Xamarin planning on redesigning the code generation to utilize Source Generators? If so, will it be designed so that it would be relatively easy to choose the (assuming they exist) necessary Source Generator - thus providing us (the VB community) the ability to assist in providing the VB versions of these Source Generators?

I could be way off base here... as Source Generators are still very new and they may not actually fit the "hidden" side of how Xamarin does things... with that said, I suppose it doesn't hurt to ask. ;-)

[DualBrain]

VB.NET and C# have the same IL code as the output. You can call your VB.NET shared code from C# library

Certainly... as this is the way that it has to be done today. However, this means that there is a C# project for the "UI" and one-or-more projects for the "business logic". The context shift is a pain-in-the-arse! Considering that the problem is the generated code code part forces us to have to write the rest of our UI logic (code-behind) in the same language as that which was generated, it's hard for us VB folks to understand why the code-spit can't be in our language instead of being forced to write code in "what other people want us to use".

[DualBrain]

"People, I just want to say, can't we all get along? Can't we all get along?" -- Rodney King, May 1, 1992.

In response to the, what appears to be, an unreasonable number of thumbs-downs simply (IMO) a topic that has the VB reference in it's title. We are all, after all, just using a thin facade (our language of choice) to generate IL... so our code-generator of choice is just that... choice. And whatever happened to respecting one's choice - especially when that choice doesn't negatively impact your choice?

I have a dream! Can't we all just get along, coexist peacefully, respect each others choices in their personal preference of "template generator" and unite as one community of .NET Developers? Oh what a dream that is (and a dream I've been having for almost 20 years).

[charlesroddie]

Certainly... as this is the way that it has to be done today. However, this means that there is a C# project for the "UI" and one-or-more projects for the "business logic".

Any .Net project can reference Xamarin.Forms and create UI using that. So it's not true that VB/F# can only be used for business logic.

[Gandum]

not as a native template

[ocdtrekkie]

It's very frustrating the issue has been locked and punted over to a discussion. If VB is to be left to legacy frameworks only, it's a lie to say Microsoft "isn't evolving the language" but still supports it.

[rrvenki]

One of the original winning point over Java world is to use any language but use .NET. So there are about 150 programming languages in .NET platform today. When a similar language like Python is more interesting for Microsoft while their founder's own language "BASIC" is ditched shows the level of trust we as developers should keep on them (Note Us is now Them).
Earlier for many project templates we created using CS then line by line we converted them to VB and it worked. In MAUI they simply stopped compilation of NON "csproj" projects. That is plainly rude and slap on our face. Something like "Just get out of my bus if you are not CS".

[LetMyPeopleCode]

"their founder's own language..."

BASIC was created at Dartmouth when Gates was 9 years old. He did write a version of it for the Altair platform when he was 19. I'm here because I saw an article on him releasing the Altair BASIC source code to celebrate its 50th birthday.

BASIC was spaghetti code with numbered lines, one universal scope for all variables, and GOTO/GOSUB for flow control.

10 PRINT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"
20 GOSUB 80
30 PRINT "HELLO", $NAME
40 GOTO 100
...
80 INPUT $NAME
90 RETURN
100 PRINT "GOODBYE"

The thing to note is there wasn't variable or subroutine hoisting in BASIC. The program lines are executed in the order they're called... 10, 20, 80, 90, 30 40, 100, thus the moniker "spaghetti code."

[DualBrain]

In another discussion (can't remember where at the moment) I got the sense that VB isn't something that isn't wanted per se. In that discussion, the current outstanding issue is that we as a VB dev community currently can't even really participate at this point because... well... the project isn't far enough along to have even reached complete public view (still working on completely open sourcing it). Again, in that discussion, the topic of "can we contribute and will it be reviewed/accepted" and the answer is a pretty clear "Yes". So we may just be in a state of wait until this phase gets across the finish line; at least that is the current take I have on it at the moment. Is the MAUI team going to create these or will the community do so (where the team will accept the contributions)? That is the question and I suspect that the answer is the later - at least that is my take away from the other conversations that I've seen here on GitHub related to this topic. MAUI is something I'm obviously interested in digging into... but without VB support or even the possibility of contributing to having VB support, my interest/time/effort is where I know I can leverage/contribute - so I'm in a holding pattern at this point regarding MAUI.

Would it be possible for someone from the MAUI team to confirm/deny whether or not the impression I have from these other discussions is on point?

[smoothdeveloper]

In the meantime, VB6 runtime support will last lifespan of Windows 11: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstudio/visual-basic-6/visual-basic-6-support-policy

Knowing that VB.NET and C# journey have never been much different, it is strange Microsoft made Roslyn to rewrite a couple of .NET compilers into self hosted glory, to then use it only for C# tooling because "VB.NET is dying" (while there is vast amount of code that will need to compile and run, so long dotnet exists, and still good reasons to pick VB.NET to write code).

What Microsoft needs to focus on, is reducing the cost of adding an extra language support, to their frameworks, rather than force everyone to a subset of what dotnet was meant to be (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework#Language_independence) and made it even survive to this day.

I think once this is adjusted and optimized for, dotnet will become much more interesting and welcoming to people who like to use their preferred language or contribute integrating it into the nice frameworks that Microsoft puts out, because the seams and process to do so are optimized for it.

This is how the dotnet runtime and frameworks will prevail, C# can't compete with java, scala, swift, rust, and VB.NET, in enough use cases, while many of those languages can theoritically or actually target MSIL and we are only talking about shuffling CLI OO code, no matter the compiler responsible for it.

I doubt MAUI has so much "C# only" must-have stuff that mandates it to be "supported only in the one true language" mindset, with that mindset, why not support only one platform, like Windows 🙂.

[charlesroddie]

Agreed as a commentary on dotnet in general, but MAUI, like Xamarin, will support netstandard projects in any dotnet language.

[ledlightjungledStefan]

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