Visual Basic support planned for .NET 5.0

.NET Team

March 11th, 2020

We’ve heard your feedback that you want Visual Basic on .NET Core. Earlier versions of .NET Core supported Class Library and Console applications types. Starting with .NET 5 Visual Basic will support:

Class Library

Console

Windows Forms

WPF

Worker Service

ASP.NET Core Web API

We are supporting these application types to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want to migrate their applications to .NET Core. This allows Visual Basic customers to take advantage of new platform features like side-by-side deployment, cross platform support, performance and new API improvements.

One of the major benefits of using Visual Basic is that the language has been stable for a very long time. The significant number of programmers using Visual Basic demonstrates that its stability and descriptive style is valued. Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language. This supports language stability and maintains compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic. Future features of .NET Core that require language changes may not be supported in Visual Basic. Due to differences in the platform, there will be some differences between Visual Basic on .NET Framework and .NET Core.

If you are happy with .NET Framework, you can be confident that it will remain supported as long as Windows is supported because it is shipped with the OS. Both Visual Basic and C# customers can continue to use .NET Framework and need to port to .NET Core only if you want features like those listed above. If your application uses technologies that aren’t supported on .NET Core, like WebForms, Workflow or WCF, you might want to stay on .NET Framework because porting will require work to move to newer technologies.

Visual Studio regularly adds new features to improve the experience for developers, including those using Visual Basic and either .NET Core or .NET Framework. An example is the recent addition of IntelliCode for Visual Basic.

Visual Basic is a great language and a productive development environment. The future of Visual Basic will include both .NET Framework and .NET Core and will focus on stability, the application types listed above, and compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic.