The developer's resource for computer interfacing, especially USB, serial (COM) ports, mass storage, and embedded networking. (Formerly Lvr.com)

Home > Articles > Visual C# for Visual Basic Programmers

Visual C# for Visual Basic Programmers

Visual C# is a programming language that has roots in C but is object oriented like Java. Many keywords, symbols, and structures are borrowed from C.

If you’re a Visual Basic programmer, please don’t despair. Over time, Visual Basic and Visual C# have grown much closer, and switching between languages is much less of a burden than it once was. Both languages support the .NET Framework’s classes, and both can use Visual Studio’s programming environment.

Here are variables declared in Visual Basic:

Dim horizontalSpacing As Int32 = 16
Dim statusMessage As String = "OK"

And here are the same variables declared in Visual C#:

Int32 horizontalSpacing = 16;
String statusMessage = "OK"; 

Each declaration contains the same information. The differences include word order, Visual Basic’s added Dim...As, and Visual C#’s line-ending semicolons.

In general, Visual C# tends to prefer symbols for operations where Visual Basic uses words. Here are some logical operators in Visual Basic and Visual C#:

Logical Operation

AND

OR

XOR

NOT

Visual Basic

And

Or

Xor

Not

Visual C#

&

|

^

!

Of course there are fine points that may trip you up at first. For example, when declaring an array’s size in Visual Basic, you specify the upper bound, while in Visual C#, you specify the number of elements. Here is a 4-byte array in Visual Basic:

Dim buffer As Byte() = New Byte(3)

and here is the same array in Visual C#:

Byte[] buffer = new Byte[4];

The resulting arrays are identical and support indexes 0–3.

If you get stuck on how to do something in C#, code converters such as the one at converter.telerik.com do a pretty good job of converting code snippets from Visual Basic to Visual C#.