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Home > Archive > Commerce Server General > October 2004 > C# or VB.net?
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| Tony Thijs 2004-10-16, 5:52 pm |
| C# or VB.net?
When considering a complex Commerce Server clustered environment with over
500 K users expected, one of the fundamental choices to make is the
programming language to be used. Which substantial advantages are there in
c# over VB.NET that would be considered mission critical. There must be a
dozen or so I guess.
Or in other words, where and on what details does Visual Basic falls short
in that environment?
Links to backgrounders on the subject in general are also appreciated.
Kind regards
Tony Thijs
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| Tom Dacon 2004-10-17, 5:49 pm |
| The languages are so similar in their capabilities that the decision
shouldn't rest on their minor differences, which are mostly syntactical. The
only difference that could possibly be considered mission critical is C#'s
ability to run unsafe code, and if you don't absolutely require that
capability then I can't imagine what else could be a show-stopper for either
language. Performance-wise, there's no significant difference between the
two languages. They both compile down to intermediate language (IL), and
pretty much the same IL. Intelligent use of caching in your front-end code
will make more of a difference to the ultimate performance of the site than
any possible language-induced performance issues (Commerce Server does its
own caching of product information from the database, in addition to the
HTML caching that ASP.Net brings to the party).
This will seem like an iconoclastic suggestion, but of more import is
whether you're going to be starting from one of the solution sites or
rolling your own code completely from scratch. If you're going to be basing
your project on one of the solution sites, use the language the solution
site is coded in - you'll be able to use more of the solution's code
unchanged, and there's a lot of boiler-plate code in a Commerce Server
solution. Strange as it seems, that'll make more difference to your project
than any perceived advantage to one or the other of the two languages. You
may have to overcome ego issues with your developers, if that leads you to
VB.Net. It's not perceived as sexy as C#, and any C++ programmers you have
on your team have a huge investment in their high priesthood, and might
mutiny if you decree that they're now going to have to program in what they
think of as a 'toy language'.
This suggestion assumes that the members of your development team are
equally at home in the two languages, or are capable of picking up a new
language relatively quickly. It shouldn't take more than three days for a
developer with a solid computer science background, and previous exposure to
more than just one language in his or her career, to pick up C# or VB.Net.
It's the class library that you'll spend most of your time mastering, not
the language syntax, and new .Net programmers in both languages have the
same hurdle to overcome. If your programmers come from a VB background,
perhaps they feel they'd be more comfortable in VB.Net; if so, they'll soon
discover that it's not as familiar an environment as they hoped - it's a
whole new language. If they come from Java or C++, naturally they'll be more
comfortable with C#, since they're already used to case-sensitivity, curly
braces, and semicolons. In either case, if they're not already comfortable
with object-oriented design and programming, they're going to have to get
comfortable. This could be another steep learning curve to plan for.
My personal experience? I was a C programmer long before Visual Basic came
along, but started in with VB 1.0 right away for prototyping Windows apps.
Over ten years or so, as VB matured, I came to the point where I was
programming almost exclusively in VB. When I started with .Net in August of
2000, I started with VB.Net for its familiarity, quickly picked up C#
because of my background in the C language family, and now program by
preference in C#. However, if I pick up some sample code from the web for
something I want to experiment with, I do it in the language of the sample
code. And, of course, if the company I'm doing work for has chosen an
exclusive language, I use it without complaint.
HTH,
Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting
"Tony Thijs" <tonyspamboeboepamthijs@wanadoo.nl> wrote in message
news:%23l0aHz7sEHA.3772@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
> C# or VB.net?
>
> When considering a complex Commerce Server clustered environment with over
> 500 K users expected, one of the fundamental choices to make is the
> programming language to be used. Which substantial advantages are there in
> c# over VB.NET that would be considered mission critical. There must be a
> dozen or so I guess.
>
> Or in other words, where and on what details does Visual Basic falls short
> in that environment?
>
> Links to backgrounders on the subject in general are also appreciated.
>
> Kind regards
>
> Tony Thijs
>
>
>
>
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