One of the most widely used programming languages is nearing the end of its life, as Microsoft starts winding down Visual Basic.
In a developer blog, the .Net team says that Visual Basic support is planned for .Net 5.0. The group is working “to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want to migrate their applications to .NET Core. This allows Visual Basic customers to take advantage of new platform features like side-by-side deployment, cross platform support, performance and new API improvements.”
In spite of that however, the post makes it clear that Visual Basic’s future does not include growing beyond its current abilities and status.
“Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language. This supports language stability and maintains compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic. Future features of .NET Core that require language changes may not be supported in Visual Basic. Due to differences in the platform, there will be some differences between Visual Basic on .NET Framework and .NET Core.”
While Visual Basic has been a pivotal part of Microsoft’s development history, the writing is on the wall: the language seems destined to fade into the background, replaced by newer, more robust options.
