I just finished my first VB.NET project and it was pretty interesting. Some of you might be wondering why I did a project in VB.NET. There are actually 3 reasons:
- Client's money is still green
- Site was the first .NET application by someone straight out of classic ASP
- Client won't pay to upgrade to C#
Now that we've cleared that up, I'd like to say how awkward it was. First of all, it took me probably twice as long to write this as it would if it were in C#. This is due to my not knowing the in's and out's of VB.NET 2.0 and not necessarily something I can blame on VB. While there are some great additions to VB.NET such as Generics (even though the syntax isn't very intuitive), the Using construct (about time!) there is one feature that is still not there that I use day-to-day when writing applications in C#. I am talking about collapsible regions within methods.
Take the following code example:
Protected Sub ButtonClick(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
Dim button As Button = sender
If Not button Is Nothing Then
Dim stringVariable As String = String.Empty
Select Case button.ID
Case "foo"
stringVariable = "foo"
Case "bar"
stringVariable = "bar"
Case "asdf"
stringVariable = "bar"
Case "qwert"
stringVariable = "qwert"
End Select
End If
If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(stringVariable) Then
DataAccessOrBLL.DoSomethingCoolWithThisString(stringVariable)
End If
End Sub
Given the opportunity to start from scratch I like to setup my event handlers like this. One method that handles everything I need. To me, it makes for cleaner code and much easier to read. If something goes wrong with an event handler, I can look in one place. In a C# environment I would setup a collapsible region like so:
Protected Sub ButtonClick(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
Dim button As Button = sender
If Not button Is Nothing Then
Dim stringVariable As String = String.Empty
#Region "button switch"
Select Case button.ID
Case "foo"
stringVariable = "foo"
Case "bar"
stringVariable = "bar"
Case "asdf"
stringVariable = "bar"
Case "qwert"
stringVariable = "qwert"
End Select
#End Region "button switch" 'C# would actually be #endregion
End If
If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(stringVariable) Then
DataAccessOrBLL.DoSomethingCoolWithThisString(stringVariable)
End If
End Sub
The reason I would do that is because when I am writing code I view monitor space as real estate. On each screen I like to see as much code as possible. In the example above I could add a collapsible region outside of this sub routine but that wouldn't work (at least for me). In scanning through the code I'd still want to see the section where I call DoSomethingCoolWithThisString because it's an action item so to speak. In scanning this code-behind I could see that in my handler method I am setting a string based on the button that was clicked and then calling that method in my DAL / BLL. Even though the code segment is collapsed I can still see what it is doing and if I need to fix that section (i.e. add a case for a new button added to the page) I could just uncollapse that region.
Quick tangent: Is it just me or does Intellisense seem a little slow and different than C#? Also, what's up with not being able to hightlight a segment of code, right-click, 'Surround With' when in the VB.NET environment? The 'Surround With' functionality is great for using constructs and try-catch blocks amongst other things.
At the end of the day it's all .NET and I'm kind of glad I came across this project. As a software developer in the consulting world it's nice to be dextrous when it comes to writing / reading code but I'm still partial to C#.