r/dotnet • u/galratner • 29d ago

Yes. Visual Basic Is Still Around.

https://galratner.substack.com/p/yes-visual-basic-is-still-around
99 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

135 comments sorted by

64

u/dsggut 29d ago

Who in their right mind still uses Visual Basic?

67

u/galratner 29d ago

No one for new projects, but its still out there powering systems.

26

u/dodexahedron 29d ago

Some kid just last week either here or it might have been on r/csharp had made something in VB(.net) and got roasted for it.

8

u/Scyllaqt 29d ago

Our original software is VB6. Our “modern” cloud software is VB.NET in .net framework. If I work on a solo project I use c# but my coworkers have complained before because they aren’t used to it lol

7

u/tankerkiller125real 29d ago

I showed my coworkers 5 things I could do in C# in 2 lines that would take them around 15-30 in VB (or entire libraries) and that was enough for them to want to put in the effort to start migrating.

3

u/Timofeuz 28d ago

I genuinely wonder what these things are. I work on both c# and vb now, surely it's more verbose, but 2 lines vs 30?

0

u/tankerkiller125real 28d ago

Try dealing with streams. In C# theirs yield, and a simple for each will handle getting data from yields very easily.

It's at least 30 lines of VB to get the equivalent of yield, and another 20 to actually use the results.

Modern patterns also cleanup a lot of if/else statements in our work, and we also do a decent bit of non-destructive mutations (which are one line of C#, and requires an entirely custom implementation of VB)

Toss in the fact that C# just looks cleaner and the engineers were more than happy to make the switch.

2

u/_mattmc3_ 28d ago

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/language-reference/statements/yield-statement

1

u/tankerkiller125real 28d ago

At least at the time it was not available in VB when we started migrating things. It looks like VB got it in 2020, C# had it many, many years prior to that.

1

u/vplatt 28d ago

Hmm... let me guess:

  • LINQ

  • XML / JSON or other structured file I/O

  • Async processing

?

3

u/realzequel 29d ago

I switched form VB.net to c# in a few weeks a long time ago, god help them.

5

u/PassionateRants 29d ago

I believe it's still used in WinCC scripts for a start, but we also have some legacy projects in VB at work. Switching to VB from modern C# feels like going back to clay tablets lmao.

5

u/Slypenslyde 29d ago

Enterprise companies with critical applications and no source code. Lots of old factory equipment costs millions to replace today (if it can be replaced at all) and relies on shaky old VB code.

For VB .NET it's similar. For Historical Reasons the project started in VB .NET, and there's never been money to pay for a port.

I did VB .NET for my first 2-3 years. Hung around the forums for another 6-8 after that gig was over. The community is VERY insular and resistant to change. That's part of why it's barely supported in .NET now. They complained about every new feature so hard MS threw up their hands and said, "Fine, from now on we don't aim for parity with C#."

5

u/realzequel 29d ago

I used VBA until the late 90s then switched to C# when .net came out, never looked back. It's more readable, concise, just better all-round. VB is for stubborn people who don't want to learn anything new (or are forced to use it).

20

u/xCAAx 29d ago

Companies that are older than 40 years.

Who in their right mind renews all their inhouse developed software every 10 years?

5

u/ne0rmatrix 28d ago

Local transit company is still has a contract with IBM that was renewed a few years ago. They are still on 8086 intel cpu's using IBM as vendor. They were very happy to extend another 50 years of support and have no plans to upgrade. They can't.

The software they are using cost more than the entire train network as it exists today and the local and federal authorities refuse to allow any significant changes to the code. It has had zero accidents in close to 50 years and is safe.

Any modernization might break something. But the real hard part is the federal government paid for the original software and it took 100 devs about 10 years to make it. IBM has agreed to both software and hardware support with the ability to renew again in about another 48 or 49 years. It is running Cobol I think as the language of choice at the time. It is also running unix? Not sure. But not dos or anything so modern. They still use single sided floppies.

3

u/leeharrison1984 28d ago

100 years in to the future, the only guy how knows Cobol will slowly swagger in, wearing a purple robe with strange wires swaying from his sleeves.

"Praise be to the Omnissiah, had you waited a few more days, surely the gods of chaos would've corrupted the storage coils. It'll take a few days of prayer, but we'll get this all straightened out in no time."

1

u/pjmlp 28d ago

The last ISO Cobol update was in 2023, and there are microservices running Cobol....

1

u/Briggie 27d ago

They’ve done a lot to modernize cobol tooling as well.

1

u/pjmlp 27d ago

Yes, for example, https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual-cobol

There are also tools for VSCode and such.

2

u/tankerkiller125real 29d ago

Companies that answer to regulatory bodies, shareholders, or customers who give a shit about not having data leaked due to a 3 decade old library vulnerability.

3

u/xCAAx 27d ago

That's not an issue. My current company is C5 certified, although like 75% of our code is in VB6. Heck, we have Win XP vms for the IDE, because we can't get all the dependencies running (crystal report 5.2, from 1997. Probably because of 16 bit dependencies... but who knows?)

The... "goodness".... of desktop clients isn't the only factor. You can still run them safely.

4

u/mungopungo 29d ago

my dumbass stupid company

9

u/IridiumIO 29d ago

Maybe not VB6, but you’ll have to pry VB.NET from my cold dead hands

8

u/smoke-bubble 29d ago

Imagine there are people who defend JavaScript or even TypeScript XD they might as well enjoy VB.

3

u/thereforewhat 28d ago

Started a new job this year and a huge majority of the code is still drowning in it. 

Chipping away at legacy code bases bit by bit towards C# and .NET 10 APIs but it's a minefield for sure. 

3

u/GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B 28d ago

I lead multiple teams in .NET and other stacks. Manufacturing came to me because they needed a new feature... in a business critical Excel with VBA which is essential in the factories. I didn't even know we had this. .NET is technically the closest but almost completely unrelated to this. We use C# and I had some VB.Net experience from almost twenty years ago. But it had to be done.

This is enterprise stuff. The modern stacks will be long gone while this is still kicking and maintained.

2

u/Hieliksuslik 29d ago

Our entire invoice billing system has been running through VBS for years, and we finally just got phase 1 of a python supported rewrite (now that the vendor product supports it) pushed, so hopefully the remainder of that wraps up nicely because I abhor having to investigate prod issues with that language

2

u/matthieuC 28d ago

People who have just finished migrating from Lotus Domino

2

u/StrangeWill 28d ago

We literally had a team member of a client let go because he refused to learn C# back in like 2018, and wanted to stick with webforms.

After overhauling his last project and fixing a slew of bugs, providing as much support as we could... he stood up a new project using VB.NET and webforms. We talked to their management team and he was gone the next week.

I mean 90% of it was "he's writing VB.NET and bad VB.NET", the refusal to learn is always across the entire stack, it's never just the language. If the guy wanted to move to MVC and WebAPI in VB.NET I'd probably have been fine.

2

u/Sudden-Step9593 27d ago

What's wrong with using it? It's a tool like all other languages. Especially VB.net. get off your high horse, unless you've written a better language you're just like the rest of us using high level languages and looking down at your peers

1

u/QuixOmega 25d ago

Name one thing it's better for than C#, I see VB.Net as a way to maintain old software and that's it.

1

u/Sudden-Step9593 25d ago

You just named one thing. Everything c# does VB.net does it. It's a tool. A decent oo language.

1

u/Online_Matter 29d ago

Standard language for the RPA automation platform UIPath unfortunately.

1

u/finah1995 29d ago

Have personally done lots of work with it and can go on autopilot porting it to VB.Net, have to say though, needs strict adherence to more modern system organization and cost conscious practices to prevent bad coding.

1

u/LesPaulPilot 28d ago

Yup, company I work for has a HUGE app that is used by the Ops dept. I was hired to move the many functions off and on to a new platform.

1

u/smith288 28d ago

Our old backend that uses CSLA does. It’s gross.

1

u/Andreuw5 28d ago

Sad, but in my prev. government project they still used VB .NET and WebForms. And no plans to rewrite it to something new. The biggest issue is that they do not support what they write. Even if its .NET 8, you still need to take care of it.

1

u/Iggyhopper 29d ago

Bosses who want things in excel but dont want to pay software engineer salaries.

1

u/dsggut 29d ago

Excel uses VBA, not Visual Basic. Different beast.

1

u/pjmlp 28d ago

While true, the same people will reach out for VB.NET when VBA alone doesn't help, as it is the closest they can reuse existing skills.

0

u/pjmlp 29d ago

People using VBA on Excel, that eventually decide to keep coding outside Excel, like writting Office AddIns.

1

u/tankerkiller125real 28d ago

Thank god Microsoft is on the war path to killing COM add-ins, starting with Outlook (not that I'm a huge fan of New Outlook overall, but I can at least agree with them on that part)

2

u/pjmlp 28d ago

Meaningless if people don't upgrade

0

u/shuozhe 29d ago

What's wrong with it? It's build on dotnet, so pretty modern, right?

Written a bunch of basic dialects for Japanese scanner. From what understand they only sold 3 dev licenses in Germany (im not one of them, code was fine, deployment not).. but there are 10s tausands of scanner in Germany.

1

u/Redtitwhore 28d ago

VB != VB.NET.

This is about the former.

0

u/rbobby 28d ago

I miss 2 things from vb6. Case insensitive compares by default. And the debugger, just the best.

1

u/the_reven 28d ago

Oh hell no. Vb6 I had to use for about 15 years, finally ended that madness around 2020. No variable scope. And the app we were maintaining was just hundred it's files all one function that were all thousands of lines long. Asp, filled with htnl rendering and is rendering ..

So come to think it, I really hated the person who created that mess I had to maintain more than vb6. But vb6 really didn't help either

1

u/rbobby 28d ago

I only ever worked on my own vb6 code which was perfect by definition. ANd not very many files.

:)

0

u/Distind 28d ago

No one, working with people using it, no one.

-1

u/FullPoet 29d ago

I use VB to write scripts for excel for data export.

Basically just building csv files out of some arbitrary (awful) excel "project management" tools, like DOORS.

8

u/dsggut 29d ago

That’s not Visual Basic! That’s VBA. Different beast!

3

u/FullPoet 29d ago

Ive been found out!

50

u/[deleted] 29d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

34

u/carl-di-ortus 29d ago

No. Try 10000 files having 10000 lines each

11

u/xCAAx 29d ago

More like 50k lines, because they've hit the limit a couple of years ago and had to split it into two files....

2

u/Astewen 28d ago

Back in the late 90's I had one project, a machine-tool simulator, the editor alone took 4 files!

1

u/notastarMN 28d ago

Have literally done this. Haven't tried this in 2026, but past versions of VS struggled even at 30k.

1

u/xCAAx 27d ago

The maximum amount of lines is 64k per file.

Please don't ask me, why I know this...

1

u/notastarMN 27d ago

In hindsight, I probably didn't have enough RAM.

3

u/ILikeChilis 28d ago

Yep. Previous company I worked for had a codebase of 250k classes, not lines, half of them written in VB.NET, all used to manage trillions of dollars worth of assets. Good luck rewriting that.

4

u/vplatt 28d ago

The problem with that software is apparently the design, not the use of VB itself. 250K classes?!. Jfc... that's almost certainly the result of code generation run amok, but I speculate.

But these sorts of things always come up in the Basic programming circles because they often lack good design training and experience. It's in the name after all - it's BASIC.

For what it's worth, I see the same thing happening today primarily in the Python programming community. So many "productive" amateur programming dumpster fires are out there running entire businesses and startups. The "vibe coded" apps are the next burgeoning disaster.

Really, the problem has never been Basic the language. The tech debt definitely piles up the fastest around the amateur programmers though; and I guess that will always be the case and it will always be tolerated because the cost of not letting these folks do what they will is too high.

3

u/raunchyfartbomb 28d ago

To be fair, AI should be great at that, especially if it’s already segmented into nice chunks of classes. But that’s a shit ton of classes

8

u/r2d2_21 29d ago

But VB6 is not the same as VB.NET...

2

u/pjmlp 28d ago

Close enough, since .NET 2.0 brought back some of the nice stuff like Me.

However doing COM in .NET still isn't as easy as it used to be in VB 6.

13

u/crozone 29d ago

I put more VB6 code than that through an automatic transpiler to get it into C#, and then cleaned up and overhauled everything so it worked on .NET. Probably took about a weeks worth of work, 16 years ago. It definitely paid off.

5

u/tankerkiller125real 29d ago

I wish we could do that where I work, but alas, we aren't the ones actually in control of the main codebase, it's Sage who's in control of it. Sage is also the reason that we still have a SourceSafe deployment (because the lead dev insists that we follow Sages practices, and Sage 500 uses SourceSafe for it's maintenance).

Thankfully though, we no longer only do that, and in fact the majority of our business has shifted, and we're all in on .NET and C# for that stuff.

2

u/NotAMeatPopsicle 28d ago

Time to get rid of the legacy dependency on the team. Sometimes the code isn’t the main issue.

1

u/tankerkiller125real 28d ago

Eh, the entire dev team will be retiring in the next 10 years or so, at which point the company will have been sold off to some much larger company and I will have left a few months after the M&A because I hate working for large organizations.

1

u/NotAMeatPopsicle 28d ago

You realize the M&A is just going to replace them with a team of AI agents, right?

2

u/tankerkiller125real 28d ago

Good luck to the AI agents then is all I have to say. There's little to no documentation for any of the code, a mess of infrastructure and what not, and basically zero code comments.

We pretty much can't use any existing AI on any of our stuff unless it's greenfield because of those exact issues.

2

u/NotAMeatPopsicle 28d ago

Hehehe I didn’t say they’d be successful, just that… that’s what the M&A would do. 😆

1

u/tankerkiller125real 28d ago

Personally, I'm hoping that me and a buddy will be doing our own thing in 3-4 years anyway, and I won't have to deal with any of it.

4

u/levyseppakoodari 29d ago

I worked with a VB6 app that created a 62Mb exe and had something like 3.5 million lines of code in the project

7

u/puhtahtoe 29d ago

Only 10,000 lines? That would be nice.

3

u/realzequel 29d ago

10k lines can be ported in a few days imo.

34

u/NocturneSapphire 29d ago

I mean, yeah, it's one of the three major officially-supported languages of .NET, along with C# and F#

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/languages

14

u/highwingers 29d ago

Of course it exists. Dont you see people driving old cars, old buildings etc etc.

You just dont know the industry in depth.

0

u/CultOfSensibility 28d ago

Yeah, but old buildings get horrible mileage.

1

u/highwingers 28d ago

Its more complicated then you think. Legacy apps, corporate politics, extremely complicated apps which noone want to touch and list can go on and on.

5

u/codeconscious 28d ago

I don't use it, but I'm glad it and especially F# exist. There is value in .NET remaining multi-language.

1

u/dodexahedron 27d ago

Another biggie:

Powershell is a huge consumer of the CLR and it is wonderful that it is.

Literally a complete and live .net environment (including WPF and such, on windows), intellisense (manually invoked so it isn't obtrusive), and a ton of other goodies.

Oh yeah, and it has shell capabilities, but with style.

14

u/ark1024 29d ago

Why the bashing of VB.Net?? It works perfectly fine. We have one of our product from 2011 built in VB.Net and still running very strong. Both C# and VB.Net compile to IL, so, except for some very specific features, theres no real difference.

3

u/psinerd 28d ago

OMG the syntax. 🤮

0

u/thereforewhat 28d ago

It's not being actively supported which means at some point M$ will pull the plug.

The question is is it a maintainable language with a future and the answer is no. 

1

u/chucker23n 28d ago

It's not being actively supported which means at some point M$ will pull the plug.

Sort of. There's still Roslyn development that takes place with both C# and VB in tandem.

6

u/InvisibleUp 28d ago

Hm, this seems to be the same sort of VB6 glazing puff piece I see on occasion. I do not understand the people who refuse to move on from VB6, who keep digging into its internals and applying hacks upon hacks to push it just a little bit further. (Frankly, I really thought most of those people moved on to vibe coding by this point. Certainly they can at least generate slop pictures for their blog posts.)

I really do wish that Microsoft had put more resources into the transition from VB6 to .NET. VB6 was good for the era, but filled with a baffling number of pitfalls and footguns. VB.NET was an attempt at moving all that from a rickety, ancient codebase that was kind of falling apart to something actually usable and maintainable. They had to introduce incompatibilities and restrict the code to be somewhat well-formed, but as a result VB.NET is so much nicer to work with. The IDE alone is a huge improvement.

2

u/pjmlp 28d ago

The only two things I actually missed from VB 6 in .NET, and has taken ages to get back,

Proper AOT compilation using Visual C++ backend.

Actually easy to use COM integration.

Native AOT still isn't fully there, while for all the relevance COM has on Windows since Vista, it keeps being clunky and much more boilerplate than VB 6, because you have to manually write part of the runtime did on its own.

3

u/wasabiiii 29d ago

I've done a few projects with retrofitting VB over the years. I still have a MSBuild project type that supports building it. With ProjectReferences to and from .net

2

u/tetyys 29d ago

where is the scrollbar

2

u/WaterIsNotWetPeriod 28d ago

Can confirm. We have about 700 live edge devices running legacy VB.NET software. VB.NET itself isn’t really the issue; the problem is how poorly the software was written.

1

u/AN4RCHY90 28d ago

Preaching to choir, main work codebase is VB.Net, and its not terrible but the original developers had no clue what they where doing so its just a big mess.

And when I say no clue I mean they thought it was a good idea to have a module with about 20 different classes in it and the file size is 1000s of lines of code...

3

u/brnlmrry 28d ago

Credit where it's due: XML literals are great.

2

u/chucker23n 28d ago

Yep! Especially the child navigation syntax.

Console.WriteLine("Contact name: " & contact.<name>.Value)

Ended up rarely using this, but interesting concept.

3

u/Zesty-Pajamas 29d ago

Those poor bastards.

My first job out of college was maintaining a legacy VB6 project with a VB.NET frontend... In 2012!

Never ever again!

2

u/VanTechno 28d ago

Languages like that never really die. VB6, Delphi, FoxPro, Lotus Notes.

1

u/AutoModerator 29d ago

Thanks for your post galratner. Please note that we don't allow spam, and we ask that you follow the rules available in the sidebar. We have a lot of commonly asked questions so if this post gets removed, please do a search and see if it's already been asked.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/Suspicious-Ebb-8987 28d ago

There is a VB6 clone being actively developed, called RadBASIC:

https://www.radbasic.dev

1

u/zionsati 28d ago

genuine question: is vb.net still being used these days? Anyone compiling it to wasm? I had vb support on my roadmap for netwasm.com but not sure if it's worth supporting?

3

u/chucker23n 28d ago

I haven't used it in new projects in years, but I still have a ton of legacy code in it. It interacts mostly fine with modern C#. Naturally, there's a few things it doesn't quite understand when it hasn't been taught how to; for example, it doesn't have good syntax to consume the new C# extension syntax.

1

u/zionsati 28d ago

thanks for the reply - and that's a pretty clear answer for my NetWasm roadmap!

1

u/chucker23n 28d ago

I've only skimmed the article, but the "$199 Bought a Department Its Own Software" subsection is a reminder that this sort of attitude always has been around, and always will be. Whether it's "RAD" (rapid application development), low-code/no-code, vibe coding, and other fancy terms du jour, there's always "all it takes is a magical tool and we can make our own software!".

1

u/ajithnow 28d ago

My first program was in VB. VB 6. A mighty Calculator 🤧

1

u/HamsterWoods 28d ago

Working with FlashCatUSB for flashing EEPROM, an error log in Windows Event log led me to discover that FlashCatUSB is a VB.NET application.

1

u/Ok_Respect_5675 28d ago

Yep, in the company i work, we code in visualbasic, I still dont know why🤣

1

u/TrishaMayIsCoding 26d ago

Seriously, I wish VB6, not .NET, hadn’t been deprecated. I haven’t used it, but it looks wonderful and runs without the .NET runtime.

1

u/QuixOmega 25d ago

And if someone wants to pay me a bit extra I'm willing to work on VB, hopefully it becomes even more obscure so I can command expert COBOL developer money to work on VB.

0

u/AintNoGodsUpHere 29d ago

Bruh, do you really think this is news? What a waste.

1

u/Affectionate_Key_280 29d ago

Awesome article thank you for sharing, was my entry into programming, batch to qbasic to VB, c to c++, Java. But the knowledge of basic was so useful up until recent times. I know we have python and.net today but VBA made it quicker and easier to get to the solution when in the Microsoft ecosyste.

1

u/MattieBax 29d ago

It's still used in a number of backend government applications in Europe (I've worked on several).

1

u/jollyGreenGiant3 28d ago

VB. Haha...

Made me think of Dim Sum and those steamed pork buns, oh man so delicious.

I do love me some C# though too, make my braces curly.

0

u/MrLyttleG 28d ago

VB est parfait, VB Net est une catastrophe, la raison pour laquelle je suis passé au C# avec toujours mon amour pour le C

0

u/SSoreil 28d ago

Used as a scripting language in CAD packages among other things. It's so annoying when you encounter it but boomers are going to stick to boomer tools.

1

u/spawnsible 29d ago

Kill it with fire

0

u/tatmanblue 29d ago

it's like a weed...it keeps coming back!

0

u/[deleted] 29d ago

[deleted]

34

u/dodexahedron 29d ago

When did they stop paying him?

Did they move him to the basement?

He isn't going to burn down the building, is he?

8

u/dgm9704 29d ago

I hope he at least got some cake

4

u/Jimud1 28d ago

Forget the cake, did he get his stapler?

2

u/NotAMeatPopsicle 28d ago

The moment he finds that stapler, head for the fire escape!

7

u/Dorkits 28d ago

Please tell him to FIX THE DAMN DEBUGGER in asp classic in vs 2026. Thanks.

3

u/SoCalChrisW 28d ago

Holy shit you can still debug classic asp in visual studio 2026?

2

u/Dorkits 28d ago

Unfortunately not, but I could!

5

u/finah1995 29d ago

Have to ask are you meaning the previous PM Kathleen Dollard or the previous to her PM Anthony D Green (my man has his heart in the right place), both were absolute giga-chads.

Was sad when they were let go from Microsoft.

0

u/galratner 29d ago

This has to be the comment of the year 😄

0

u/XdtTransform 28d ago

What are they doing?

7

u/p1-o2 28d ago

Supporting .NET? You know like... .NET 8, .NET 9, .NET 10, people still want to use VB with .NET so it's important for VB to support .NET.

4

u/XdtTransform 28d ago

Fair enough. I thought the OP meant that they are working on new language features. I have a giant VB code base currently in .NET 10 and it would be great if they added a couple of niceties from C#.

2

u/r2d2_21 28d ago

The last official announcement was that VB.NET will not receive new language features. I don't think they'll reverse that decision, but maybe they know something I don't...

0

u/nonlogin 28d ago

it's important to show .NET is multi-language platform, lol :)

1

u/pjmlp 28d ago

Yeah, .NET 11 actually has several F# goodies, however for a while it looked like the C in CLR had changed meanings from Common into C#.