Express – Visual Basic

Alright, I admit, I’m tempted. The new Visual Basic plus development environment, free (as in beer) to download today.

Should I take a look? See how hard it’d be to translate SdiDesk into it?

Things to consider, positive and negative :

– It’s .Net 2.0 only, so part of MS’s forced upgrade strategy.

– The output will probably look good.

– There will probably be good web protocol and XML handling libraries available.

– It’s a different language from VBClassic so serious rewriting will be needed. OTOH, although I’m not a fanatic, I’m a pretty sensible OO developer, I haven’t used VB that differently from the way I’d write Java, so the changes shouldn’t be too much of a shock. (I explicitly declare the types of all my variables, I use Interfaces a lot in the design)