Microsoft baffles me. Over the years there has been a waxing and waning support for Visual Basic. Microsoft at times has held it on high as the next generation of programming for the masses. At other times have ignored it completely.

The latest release of ASP.NET Core 2.1 has again slighted the developers who use Visual Basic. The lack of full support for ASP.NET, no Razor page support, and even basic lack of documentation has just reinforced the idea that VB is just not important to Microsoft anymore. I feel like a second-class citizen due to the lack of discussion and communication to the community.

I don’t like C syntax, never have, even when I had to use it for embedded applications. Its unfortunate many languages today are following the C syntax base. I loved the idea of Visual Basic. VB followed a more natural language syntax and is still one of the easiest languages to show non-sophisticated users program flow.

I need Microsoft to step up their support for Visual Basic. I want Microsoft to document ASP.NET Core for VB, and provide a more complete road-map to Visual Basic support. The alternative will be that the community will start bleeding users to other languages like Python, and JavaScript. Maybe this is what Microsoft wants. So they can just get rid of VB all together.

Richard “Bonejob” Barnes — Moderator /r/visualbasic