Lots of people are blogging about the updated information available in the .NET Roadmap. Am I the only one concerned that the Edit and Continue features specifically mentioned for VB.NET will not make it into C# as well?? Maybe the performance will be so much better in VS.NET Whidbey that it won't be that big of a deal, but currently I find myself craving this feature constantly.
I also originally read that generics will be implemented at the CLR level but only available in C#. The roadmap, however, tells us otherwise.
I mentioned this whole language divergence in the past, and at the VSLive! keynote yesterday it was definitely implied on several occasions that something was either a VB.NET feature or a C# feature.
But if a feature is supported at the CLR level, what is the compelling reason not to make it available to all languages?
In fact, with something like edit-and-continue - depending on how Microsoft goes about implementing it, I can imagine it might even be more effort to make it available to one language and not another.
But then, let's think about it: VB developers are most likely the core constituency of the VB.NET community, while the C# camp is most likely made of up former Java and C/C++ programmers. So while generics might be a big selling point for the former C++ developer, they may not be for a VB developer who hasn't had the opportunity to use them in the past. The same logic applies to a feature like edit-and-continue - you know, “if I've gotten by this long without it....”
The point is that this whole language divergence business might in fact be less of a real technical divergence than a divergence in perception and marketing .
Oh well - I guess time will tell.