Subtitles of the Movie

Now of all the questions that you can ask about the .NET Framework the one that's going to get you in trouble the fastest is to ask the question of which Language is best? And of course we're talking about C# or VB.NET. Now, let me warn you. This is akin to asking one of those questions about Chevrolet or Ford, Democrat or Republican, Baptist or Methodist, or Catholic or whatever. This is some very serious sacred ground for a lot of people and you'll hear a lot of debates out there about why VB.NET people need to get a life and learn how to program, and why C# people, you know, are this or that, or whatever. Here's the bottom line with it really. When you come to the .NET Framework you probably should use the language to closest to what you're familiar with. Now, C# is more C-like, Java-like; you've got the curly braces and all that kind of stuff. It is a more terse language. You don't have to really write as much code to get things done. VB.NET, now, a lot of people will make the arguments that VB.NET is more descriptive, you have to write a little more code; it's a little more verbose. So anyway, this thing just goes on and on and on. Now, there's an interesting site out there you might want to go take a look at, but notice it's .NET Power.com/languages. aspx, and they've got like, over I don't know, 50 or 60 different languages that you can use on the .NET Platform and they even have links to get out to the compilers, I mean, to the various information about these things. So your real question on the language in this is which language am I most comfortable with because really what it comes down to is it's not so much the language that you're using, but it's the programmer who's using that language as far as the kind of applications they get. Now, there are a lot of arguments out there Ð can I do some things in C# that I can't do in VB.NET Ð people are always finding little things like that. They're big things to them, I'll just tell you look at them and see which one you're comfortable with. Now you do need to watch this going forward and I would strongly recommend you go out to Microsoft's site and look around and read some of the blogs and so forth. Theoretically these languages are identical because once we actually program in them then they become identical because Ð let me draw a little diagram here right quick. This is ultimately how the .NET Framework works Ð so we write our code, right, so here we've written our code and then when we compile it what used to happen in the old days is it basically went straight to machine code and then was run on the CPU. But what's happening now with .NET code is it goes to a little area called MSIL, and this is where it kind of prepares it for the .NET Framework. It's not really in machine-level code, it's just simply kind of an intermediate language, Microsoft Intermediate Language as a matter of fact, and then from there it jumps down to the actual CTU, to actually run on the machine, OK? So, and excuse the primitive graphics here. You can tell I'm an artist, right? So, the bottom line is, is regardless of whether you're using VB.NET or C#, once you leave the actual code that you wrote here and you get to MSI, it was really pretty much all about the same from here to the CPU, OK? So the different is, is exactly how to I write it to get to that point. So all I can tell you is, for now, program with the one you're most comfortable with. If you're new, an absolutely new beginner then you can choose these based on whatever. Talk to some other programmers, OK, but if you have any background whatsoever in programming go with the one you're most comfortable with because that's what you're probably going to build the best applications with. So anyway, choose between generally C#, VB.NET and take off. The examples, or anything that you see in this Course is going to be in VB.NET. That's where I've grown up and where I've kind of lived. I've done some C#, I like it, but VB.NET is just more natural for me, OK? So anyway, I can hear some of you C# people smirking at me now, I can kind of feel that, OK? So, pick your language and go for it.