Tag: visual basic

VB.NET for Java Developers – Updated Cheat Sheet

The BASIC programming language (originally invented at Dartmouth College in 1964) and Microsoft share a long history together. Microsoft basically started their business with the licensing of their BASIC interpreter (Altair BASIC), initially developed by Paul Allan and Bill Gates. Various dialects of Microsoft’s BASIC implementation were installed in the ROMs of many home computers like the Apple II (Applesoft BASIC) or the Commodore 64 (Commodore BASIC) during the 1970s and 1980s. A whole generation of programmers discovered their interest for computer programming through BASIC before moving on to greater knowledge.

BASIC was also shipped with Microsoft’s successful disk operating system (MS-DOS) for the IBM PC and compatibles. Early versions were BASICA and GW-BASIC. Original BASIC code was based on line numbers and typically lots of GOTO statements, resulting in what was often referred to as “spaghetti code”. Starting with MS-DOS 5.0 GW-BASIC was replaced by QBasic (a stripped down version of Microsoft QuickBasic). It was backwards compatible to GW-BASIC and introduced structured programming. Line numbers and GOTOs were no longer necessary.

When Windows became popular Microsoft introduced Visual Basic, which included a form designer for easy creation of GUI applications. They even released one version of Visual Basic for DOS, which allowed the creation of GUI-like textual user interfaces.

Visual Basic.NET

The current generation of Microsoft’s Basic is Visual Basic.NET. It’s the .NET based successor to Visual Basic 6.0, which is nowadays known as “Visual Basic Classic”.

Feature-wise VB.NET is mostly equivalent to C#, including full support for object-oriented programming, interfaces, generics, lambdas, operator overloading, custom value types, extension methods, LINQ and access to the full functionality of the .NET framework. The differences are mostly at the syntax level. It has almost nothing in common with the original BASIC anymore.

Updated Cheat Sheet for Java developers

A couple of years ago we published a VB.NET cheat sheet for Java developers on this blog. The cheat sheet uses Java as the reference language, because today Java is a lingua franca that is understood by most contemporary programmers. Now we present an updated version of this cheat sheet, which takes into account recent developments like Java 8:

A VisualBasic.NET cheat sheet for Java developers

If you want to learn VisualBasic.NET coming from a Java perspective, we’ve prepared a little cheat sheet to ease the transition.

Sometimes, we cannot choose what language to implement a project in. Be it because of environmental restrictions (everything else is programmed in language X) or just because there’s an existing code base that needs to be extended and improved. This is when our polyglot programming mindset will be challenged. In a recent project, we picked up the current incarnation of VisualBasic, a language most of us willfully forgot after brief exposure in the late nineties, more than 10 years ago.

Spaceward Ho!

So we ventured into the land of VisualEverything, installing VisualStudio (without ReSharper at first) and finding out about the changes in VisualBasic.NET compared to VisualBasic 6, the language version we used back in the days. Being heavily trained in Java and “javaesque” languages, we were pleasantly surprised to find a modern, object-oriented language with a state-of-the-art platform SDK (the .NET framework) and only little reminiscences of the old age. Microsoft did a great job in modernizing the language, cutting out maybe a bit too much language specific stuff. VisualBasic.NET feels like C# with an uninspired syntax.

Making the transition

To ease our exploration of the language features of VisualBasic.NET, one of our student workers made a comparison table between Java and VisualBasic.NET. This cheat sheet helped us tremendously to wrap our heads around the syntax and the language. The platform SDK is very similar to the Java API, as you can see in the corresponding sections of the table. And because it helped us, it might also help you to gain a quick overview over VisualBasic.NET when you are heading from Java.

I have to thank Frederik Zipp a lot for his work. My only contribution to this cheat sheet is the translation from german to english. I can only try to imagine his effort of putting everything together. And while you might read the whole comparison in about 21 minutes (as stated in the title), it’s worth several hours of searching.

The downloads

And without much further ado, here are the download links for the HTML and PDF versions of the “Java vs. VisualBasic.NET cheat sheet”:

You may use and modify the documents as you see fit. If you redistribute it, please adhere to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Thank you.